

**SmashWords Edition**

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase·an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it·was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your·own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter Fifteen

Honeybunz Runz Gunz

The Mall Snatch

AutoCinematic

The Chisholm Heist

Safe Sex

Room With View

Deconstructive Criticism

High Seas

The CERN Raid

Armed Response

Argumetum Ad Amphetamine

Chillin' On Minius

Chapter Forty-Four

Smuggler's Cove

Steenking Badges

About The Authors

(Click Chapter Heads To Return)

The towns of the Nayarit coast present foreign travelers with some exotic contrasts. In Buenas Peras, now commonly called Peritas, you can stand in the tower room of the Los Arcos restaurant, and look out the open space that was a wall before El Nino's storms toppled all the nice places along the stone-trimmed _malecón_ and carved away most of the wide beach and covered everything in rubble, and you'll be looking south along a postcard-perfect tropical beach with leaning palms, white coral sand, squadrons of pelicans, and inverted hulls of wooden fishing boats. To experience the contrast, all it takes is a glance up the main street at a dusty cowtown full of men in boots and Stetsons, shuffling livestock, rusty pickups, and rodeo posters. Cowpokes idly twirling lassos while their bored horses clop down the cobblestone streets are as common a sight as the surfers bobbing on the big breaks at the river mouth berm.

So Torres and Morales blended right in as they sidled their ponies past the cinema (double feature of a Cantinflas film and "Police Academy 3" doing business as "Academia de Locos") and the "Flor de Michoacan" popsicle parlor, then poked very slowly past the glass front of the BanComer branch. Just two more cowboys down to town for whatever thrill a guy could buy in Peritas, not even noteworthy for the odd way the blankets draped over their saddles hung down several feet on each side.

The two gangsters noted that the bank was as full of gringo retirees cashing money orders and traveler's checks as they had hoped it would be. More to the point, there were no cops. So the men just loitered their nags near the bank's front doors and did nothing to stop the battered panel truck from driving up and double parking right in front. Torres had wondered why the truck stopped abruptly in front of the La Korita drugstore then moved steadily on down the street past the trees, sleeping dogs and hicks sitting on curbs. He didn't know that the gringa had been trying to get Martillo to wait while she ran in the store for a few quick purchases, and he had refused fairly harshly on the grounds that the course of a heist was no time to be buying lipstick.

Nobody paid much attention to the truck, either; one more lumpy Dina looking like an off-kilter Suburban. Then Dancy Russell got out and started walking down the sidewalk wearing a very minimal bikini top and Levi's cut short enough to show little white moons of butt over her world-class golden legs and nobody noticed much else. Her stride was even more inflammatory than usual, since she was in a tail-twitching snit at Martillo for not letting her stock up on cosmetics. Even the women stared, roughly divided between scowling disapproval and a bottomless envy. It is doubtful that anyone even saw four men get out of the back of the truck and walk into the bank--or even the two horsemen slipping them machine guns from under their blankets.

Across the street in her sandwich shop, Doña Toña Alvirez watched Dancy parading the street in next to nothing and clucked to herself over the shamelessness of gringas. She had even seen them sunning themselves stark naked over on the beaches at Chacala and Los Ayala. Which was actually better than wearing a suit like that one, come to think of it. More straightforward at any rate.

ミ

Once she turned off the main street Dancy broke into a jog, racing down the block while plunging her hands into her large beach bag. As she ducked into the open gate of "Bloqueria Gomez", she was already shrugging into a long, shapeless grey frock. She quickly threaded her way through the courtyard and sheds inside, pulling a beach towel over her shoulders like a _rebozo_. The place was a tile and block factory, where the workers were pouring cement slurry into molds, then using a manual press to squeeze the "ceramic" tiles tight enough to handle. Predictably, they gaped at Dancy, one of them hanging from the long handle of the press where he'd been bouncing like a monkey for greater pressure. She drew out a pop-up sunhat, let its wide brim snap open, then bent over to pour her hair into it, transfixing the _bloqueros_. When she reached the opposite door, she turned and struck a model's pose then "flashed" open her wrap at the tile-makers, blew them a kiss, dashed out the door and ran up to the main drag buttoning the frock then calmly rounded the corner and walked into the bank doors. Morales had gone to get the stolen pickup they'd left on the next block, but his horse was tied to a gutted parking meter in front of the bank and Torres was there to give her a pirate grin and a submachine gun. Holding the gun under her skirts (and, truth to tell, rubbing it against her rather excited crotch) she walked into the bank like gangbusters.

ミ

Dancy's re-emergence didn't escape notice in the sandwich shop. Just as Doña Toña was awarding grudging approval to the gringa for covering herself up, she saw her step in the bank door and take a short, ugly firearm out of her dress. Doña Toña batted her eyes--this was one gringa that would bear watching. She squinted into the dark interior of the bank and could see people moving around instead of standing still in line. She turned around and shuffled slowly back into the shop where six of her children were huddled around a fritzing TV set watching a snowy semblance of the Disney Channel. She turned off the TV and told Reuben, the oldest of her brood, to bring a chair out front for her. She settled into the chair on the sidewalk, her kids came out and sat in a line on the stoop. Reuben passed a bag of chips down the line of kids keeping an expectant eye on the bank.

ミ

Dancy slid into the bank with a lax smile, her eyes and gun sweeping the room for challenge. The line of customers still stretched entirely around the inside of the bank, but now they all had their hands clasped behind their heads and their eyes fastened on Santiamen and Ramos, who were looking quite capable of shooting them down for lunch meat. The two pretty young tellers were by the barred door of the vault, quivering like frightened mares in the lecherous clutches of Maldonado and Regalado. Martillo was having a heart-to-heart with the branch manager, who seemed very co-operative, as well as flabbergasted by Martillo's mask.

He was the only masked member of the gang, since he was the one readily recognizable. Dancy had chosen the mask from the remains of Armando's huge collection. It was carved wood, featuring the bearded face, elaborately curled hair, and glaring gaze of a biblical patriarch--but with a large red scorpion passed through his head; curving' steel-spiked tail coming out of one ear and the evil agate eyes from the other. It wouldn't have looked half so surrealistic, though, without Martillo's buff Stetson perched on top of it. Martillo had groused, "It's just some stupid Indio superstitious thing."

"It's perfect," Dancy had told him over his understandable objections, "Nobody will remember anything else about any of us."

"I think they might remember somebody looking like Faye Dunaway," he'd said. But Dancy was rooting among the other masks. "Too bad they don't have some kind of codpiece," she mumbled, "A nice beaded combat dildo with lobster claws or something."

Martillo had to have "codpiece" and "dildo" explained. He grimaced, "How about if I just run in with a naked hard-on and a gun in each hand?"

"I like it," Dancy crowed. "A lot. But not this time. You've gotta keep back something for the sequel."

Martillo had made his preliminary announcements in both Spanish and English, and the Mexicans customers looked very cowed by his remarks and the cavalier display of firepower. Some foreigners, however, were just disgruntled, arrogant and ignorant enough to put up some guff. One bandy-legged, barrel-chested old fart with tufts of white hair sticking out his ears like a goat and "Navy Chief, Retired" practically tattooed on his forehead, rolled up to Ramos saying, "Look here, Peedro."

He thought of himself as a local hand because he'd owned a house in Peritas for twenty years, although he spoke no Spanish and knew no locals; that he was a shrewd investor because he had $30,000 in the BanComer at 95% interest, although that rate didn't even match the peso's inflation; and that he had a natural authority over Mexican riffraff, although nobody had understood his barked orders around the town and only humored him out of a pious regard for the feeble-minded.

He demanded that they get their butts out of the bank and quit pestering American bigod citizens. Ramos grinned, stuck the tip of a machine gun in the old salt's mouth, pointed at his massive gold Omega, snapped his fingers for it. "What are you gonna do, Julio, shoot an American citizen?" the old guy cawed around the gun barrel.

"Not at all," Dancy Russell snapped from behind him. As he turned, glad to deal with somebody intelligent enough to speak American, she went on. "We're going slap your silly face."

She gave a full backhand swing that snapped through the bank like a pistol shot, almost knocking the geezer off his feet. "Then we'll kick you in your used-up old nuts."

She did that so well he didn't even cry out, just hit the floor unconscious. "Then I'll just sit on your face while I go through your pockets and decide whether to cut off your shriveled old pecker and toast it over a campfire."

She plunked down on his face and looked around the other tourists. "Is there anyone else who doesn't understand that they should give us everything they have and hope to God it's enough?"

There was a rapid tattoo of purses, wallets and watches hitting the floor. Dancy bounced up, curtsied and said, "Very good, now for short arm inspection and pap smears."

The rudimentary vault had been locked only with a key, which had been forthcoming very fast when Torres and Santiamen loomed over the manager. Regalado and Maldonado whooped inside, rifling stacks of cash and documents and tossing them into sacks like demented Santas gone way bad. Torres looked at the deposit boxes sadly. "If only we could get into those. That's where they keep the real money, the virgin wool."

Santiamen agreed, "Gold," he rumbled, "And dollars. Not these damned pesos."

"Well, I don't see any way to get into them other than drilling the locks one by one. Damn shame."

Santiamen grunted, spit eloquently on the miserly little boxes, and lumbered out of the vault at Torres' heels.

Maldonado and Regalado were stunned by this frustrating information and stared at the boxes in a mixture of awe and indignation. "Next time we'll just blow the whole mother and pick up what's left," Regalado predicted.

Maldonado could really see the wisdom in that. "The boss should get one of those helicopters."

Regalado's eyes widened at his remembrance of the helicopter act, "Yeah, a motherless helicopter. You said it, _compa_. He wagged an admonitory finger at the offending boxes, "Next time we'll bust your mother and take a look up your skirts, you little _chingamadres_."

Meanwhile Dancy was having more luck and good clean fun with the unsecured valuables about the persons of customers. She snatched a gaudy necklace off the leather-skinned neck of a ridiculously over-tanned woman wearing large round sunglasses and a T-shirt with a big red valentine and the words "I" and "Detroit".

"Tacky enough, but maybe worth something if the stones are real." Dancy nonchalantly draped the necklace around her neck with five others. "You should know better than to wear stuff like that on the street. I mean, Detroit, for God's sake."

"And who the hell are you, you little bitch," the woman snorted, "An appraiser?"

Dancy turned to Martillo in astonishment, "See how soon they forget?" She turned back to the woman and stuck the chopper barrel into a sun-baked nostril as she introduced herself, "I'm Patty Fuckin' Hearst. And introducing my merry men, the Semiautomatic Libertine Army. We make our money the old-fashioned way. We kill people and take it."

Her crusty toughness cracked, the woman made an involuntary start with her hand, which brought Dancy's eye to her large diamond solitaire. She grabbed the hand and whistled in admiration. "No, that's my wedding ring," the woman wailed, "Thirty seven years!"

"I'd feel sorry for your husband, but he apparently had enough money to spare him some of the horror," Dancy commiserated.

The woman jerked back into her normal vitriolic mode and spat out, "It won't come off anyway."

Dancy held the finger captive while reaching out towards Ramos and snapping her fingers. "Forceps," she barked, "Scalpel."

Terrified, the woman yelled, "No, no, wait!" and started trying to push the ring off. Her struggles and sweating increased as Ramos sauntered over, groping in the pockets of his coveralls. She was at the point of fainting when he extracted a pair of side-cutters, murmured " _Con su permiso_ ," and snipped off the ring to present it to Dancy with a courtly flourish.

Dancy started off, admiring the ring, then stepped back, grabbed the woman's sunglasses and put them on. "We're just gangsters, lady," she explained, "Gangsters of love."

Nobody else gave Dancy the slightest trouble as she stripped their purses and pockets. While the Mexican customers kept nervous eyes on Santiamen as armed bear and Martillo as avatar of the Scorpion God protocols, the gringos unanimously rolled their eyes to follow Dancy; silently apprehensive as she did Paula Abdul steps around the lobby, cramming their stuff in her bag while singing to herself, "Money, it's a crime..."

The only hitch was the manager. The man had been a shambles from the first, sweating and trembling. But when Santiamen pulled him to his feet and told him to be a good little hostage or else, the man turned grey and grabbed for his chest, nearly fainting. Both of the tellers gasped and the shorter, prettier one tried to run to help him, brought up short by Maldonado's arm across her chest and fingers around her right tit. At her first movement Ramos had reflexively jerked his gun up to cover her, but she dared it, sobbing, "No, no, his heart...his surgery...oh, please don't!"

The girl shrugged free of Maldonado's groping and brushed past Ramos' gun, running to where the manager had slumped back into his chair and falling on her knees beside him. "You can't take him, you've hurt him enough. Take me instead."

Annoyed, Martillo stepped over to the desk and tore open the sweat-stained white shirt. There was no mistaking the shiny red scar and raw stitch marks up the sternum. The man was deeply shaken, but licked his lips and said, "No. I'm okay. Leave the girls alone."

Impressed by these sudden flourishes of courage and devotion, Martillo turned to Santiamen and ordered, "He'd just die on us. Take the girls instead." The big man nodded as though he'd already assumed that much and gently pulled the sobbing teller off the man and motioned Regalado to take the other girl over to the door. At the sight of the tall girl's pale, shocked face and shaky step the manager stirred in his chair, begging Martillo, "No, please. Take me and leave the girls. They're just kids. I'll be all right."

Martillo growled that all the bravery was very touching but the girls were hostage and that was that. He leaned his hideous mask down into the manager's face, as though menacing him, and said in a low, soft voice, "Don't worry about the girls. No harm will come to them. I promise you that." The manager stared at the grotesque persona in amazement, as though it had just occurred to him there was a human behind it.

As Santiamen slung his gun and gathered up most of the bags, Maldonado and Regalado hustled the girls to the door, restraining their more overt feel-copping under Ramos' frown. Dancy finished gathering wallets and glanced at the girls. "Good thinking, boys," she congratulated them, "Man doesn't live by bread alone."

As they formed up in the door for their dash to the car, Ramos and Torres covering the crowd for their withdrawal, she frowned and said, "But isn't it more traditional to throw the women over your shoulders?"

"We're robbing the bank," Martillo snapped, "Not sacking the town."

"Ah, right," she shrugged, "One step at a time."

As the gang burst out of the bank Dancy, instead of getting in the back of the truck with the hostages as planned, untied Torres' horse and swung up on it as the truck doors all slammed. Only Morales and Torres, at the wheels of the getaway trucks, saw her. She had the pony figured out before it took five steps; young, poor quality, skittish enough for about anything. She took him in hand and headed him out into the street.

As the trucks pulled away from the curb Martillo saw her cutting across towards the park. Torres saw her too and braked the panel so suddenly that Morales bumped its rear end with the pickup. The whole gang watched Dancy canter over to the park and jump the three-foot white stone fence that supported the huge gilt bust of Padre Hidalgo. She went right to the center and up the stairs of the little bandstand as the whole town stared in universal wonder. Rearing the horse and spinning it around, she fired a burst into the air then smoothly recovered as the terrified horse tore off the platform and back into the street. At a full, dusty gallop she waved her hat, then scaled it away to let her hair blow free. She plunged past the taco venders, sidewalk stalls, and gawking _campesinos_ , firing at the signs that stuck out above the rooftops. She punched 9mm holes through the ads for "La Islena" liquors, "El Nayar" hardware, and "Luna de Miel" bar as she charged out towards the highway.

Torres was already accelerating. It was only his first bank job and evidently a highly unorthodox one at that, but he knew better than to stick around admiring the craziness of a gringa. He said, " _Jefe_?"

"Follow her," Martillo said. "We'll catch her on the highway."

From the back, Ramos said, "Not until she's out of bullets, I hope."

She was waiting at the crossing. She jumped off the horse and fired a last burst into the air, then yelled at Peritas in general, "Too rad for you!"

"You could have just called the police and saved bullets," Martillo grumped as she hopped in the panel's rear doors.

"I think they got the word as soon as we were out the door, sugar. I just couldn't resist. I mean how often does a girl get the chance to shoot up a town?"

Martillo said nothing as the two trucks blasted up the grade towards the hills to the south, making it clear he didn't care for the cinematic school of bank jobs. But Regalado and Maldonado, sitting like tail gunners in the back of the pickup, approved enthusiastically. "I told him," Maldonado swore, "We should have done it on horseback. How would the cops catch us if we're in the jungle, not on the road?"

"That _bandida_ mother has got it right," Regalado agreed, "On horseback, all balls and a cloud of gunsmoke-- _a todo madre_." The gang had almost forgotten her as a sex object--she had big balls and that was that.

ミ

Doña Toña and her kids had been enjoying the hold-up, especially the equitation exhibition, which Reuben claimed was as good as the _cabalcadas_ and rodeos the local _charros_ put on. But when Dancy started shooting, she wondered if she hadn't been rash letting the kids come outside. Especially when she heard a bullet whack into the sign above her shop. When the trucks had gone, she sent Reuben across the street to inspect it and was not surprised to hear that their plywood likeness of Condorito, the brash little condor that is Latin America`s answer to Bugs Bunny, had taken a round right in the gizzard. Doña Toña nodded as if she'd expected as much. A souvenir of the hold-up should be good for business. She wondered if the gringa had aimed the shot. Probably. Those hussies always seemed to know what they were about.

ミ

It only took the gang twenty minutes to reach the first turnoff, and another fifteen to climb to the end of the dirt road where they had stashed the hijacked bakery truck at a tiny rancho. While they hastily transferred the hostages and money sacks into the step van, Martillo and Ramos debated a change of plans on the hostages. They had planned to keep the manager with them until the last minute, then abandon him on the treacherous, twisting road they would take over the mountain to Bahia Mantechen. But the tall girl was so obviously in deep hysterical shock that Dancy felt sorry for her, even apprehensive that she might drop dead on them. They decided to leave her at the rancho, where the Senora clucked sympathetically and started cooking her something.

They loaded the other girl into the truck and crept back down to the highway, turning back towards the north. The big truck was painted with the name and design of Bimbo, Mexico's largest bread company, and was therefore virtually invisible on the road. Dancy hadn't missed the chance to pose for several pictures, mugging with guns and bandoliers under the big Bimbo logo. She hadn't bothered to explain the pictures to Martillo, or her burst of laughter at her first sight of the truck. "It's a gringo thing," was all she'd say.

Ramos and Santiamen drove the getaway trucks down almost to the highway, then out into a fallow tobacco field, where they punctured their gas tanks and set them on fire. Dancy and Torres watched out the rear windows as the Bimbo truck drove off and were rewarded by seeing both trucks explode into roiling balls of red flame.

ミ

Doña Toña watched the pursuit being organized. One exception to the general ban on guns in Mexico is that _charros_ can carry pistols as part of their costume, so the posse consisted of local _charros_ with heavy decoration-encrusted revolvers and a few state policemen carrying M-16's and M-2 carbines. During the forming up and deploying there was a lot of excited jabbering and a lot of drinking. Also, _gracias a Dios_ , a lot of sandwiches and beer purchased off the street from Reuben and the two oldest girls. By the time the posse lit out after the owlhoots, every pickup had a contingent of _charros_ standing in the back like charioteers, pistols in one hand and bottles of Tequila or Pacifico in the other. More shots were fired into the air as they whooped out after justice. Those _bandidos_ are the safest people in Nayarit right now, Doña Toña thought.

After awhile Arturo, the bank manager, came over for a much-needed cold beer. He said he'd gotten away from the bandits a lot easier than from the police interrogators and would probably not live long enough to see the end of the bank examiners and tabloid reporters from "Alarma!". She asked his impression of the gringa and he rolled his eyes upward and touched his hand to his cleaved breastbone. She was a beautiful insane demon, he told her, a true angel from hell. Which was the way Doña Toña had figured it all along.

ミ

Martillo drove, since he was the only one who'd been masked. As they tooled right through the Peritas crossing, everyone ducked but Martillo, who cut his eyes down the main street of the town to gauge the milling around and count the trucks full of excited men. They pulled along sedately to the cutoff just past Las Varas, then headed up into the mountains on a road so sinuous, rutted, and overgrown as to be almost impassable. But they could squeeze past, and the road would eventually lead them over to Santa Cruz on Mantechen Bay, where Martillo's Buick and a van were garaged in a sugar cane barn.

The posse would find the burned vehicles pretty quickly and start searching the web of roads to the south. By then they'd have left the bread truck in the barn, where it would sit for a month until the cane harvest. They would leave the pretty teller at a tiny farm commune halfway over the hill, where it would be at least three days before she could get out. Then they would zip straight up to the main highway, come through Tepic from the north, and be safely home by nightfall.

In the back of the lurching Bimbo truck, Dancy had been studying the frightened bank teller. "You know," she told her, "You're not a bad-looking kid."

"She can't understand you," Martillo said from the front seat.

"Oh, she understands," Dancy said, "Female vanity is a universal language." She leaned across the scared _Mexicana_ , who twisted around to face her, pushing back against Regalado's shoulder. She slid a fingernail under the chain of the small gold crucifix and dangled it teasingly against the girl's sweating cleavage. The girl gasped and Morales turned around to see what was going on and was rewarded when Dancy said, "Lemme see something here," and tore the girl's blouse open. She eyed the soft, prominent mounds quivering in black lace cups. The girl was at the point of desperation but froze, eyes and nostrils flaring wide, when Dancy pulled out Armando's black and silver switchblade and snicked it open. Martillo glanced back at the sound and the truck yawed at his surprise, "What the devil are you doing?" he yelled.

"Just inspecting the booty," Dancy drawled. "Well, the boobies, really. You just watch the road; this is girl talk."

She slid the blade under the bra between the cups, then twisted it and whipped it away from the girl's ribs, slashing the bra and letting her breasts tumble free. Carefully closing the knife and pocketing it, she reached for the bra cups. The girl's hands fluttered up, but fell away at Dancy's trademark glare. Dancy gathered the lapels of the navy blazer and white blouse in both hands and hunched them down over her shoulders. The whole gang was extremely interested by this time and Regalado, looking over the girl's shoulder and feeling her shivering against him, was starting to think the gringa was the greatest thing that ever happened. Brushing the cups aside, she pulled both breasts out and cupped them gently. They were quite lovely; young, pale and firm with very dark aureoles and nipples standing out in sheer fear. "Well now, honey, this is just about pretty titty city. Right, boys?"

Martillo was pretty interested himself, even though he needed to keep a certain amount of attention on barreling the bread truck down the snaking, flaking road. He kept glancing into the mirror, not sure if he was more concerned with the girl's tits or Dancy's behavior.

"Dancy?" he finally asked, "Are you enjoying yourself?"

"I sure am, lover." Dancy was almost giggling, "I've always wanted to do that. Just check it out, you know? See if they're all they're pushed up to be. Haven't you?"

"Holy Virgin," Martillo said, "Don't hurt her, she's just a poor working girl."

"I wouldn't think of it," Dancy said. She was holding the girl's breasts up as proud as if she'd grown them herself from a seed packet. She was savoring the girl's terror, her power over all the world's nice young things. She held the girl's eye like a cobra, examining her. Was she a virgin? A Catholic? A hypocritical little bitch who'd damn her for sex and murder out of wedlock? Probably. She softened, sighed. She released the girl, patted a breast in a friendly manner. "Very nice, sweetheart. Tender vittles. But get a little more upthrust here, a smaller cup size, and don't fasten this button." She pulled the blouse back together, holding it to get the décolleté look she recommended. She made the girl hold the torn blouse, then fished in her bag for a mirror and showed the girl what she meant. God knows what the girl thought--probably that gang rape by outlaws was apparently even weirder than she'd been imagining.

Dancy took a long look at the girl holding her tits, a portrait of sexy helplessness that had Morales so hard he could barely maintain his position twisted around over the front seat. She reached into one of the duffle bags and said, "Now let's see if we can salvage that make-up."

The next time Martillo could glance back to see what sort of jolly surprises his girl was doing to his hostage in front of his gang in the middle of his getaway, she was sorting through a fistful of cosmetics.

"Where did you get that stuff?" he asked her, since he distinctly remembered scotching the drug store stop.

"Oh, all those cows had tons of it in their purses with the money and jewelry."

"You were stealing make-up during the bank robbery?"

"Well, it was pretty obvious _you_ weren't going to buy me any."

Martillo shook his head and muttered, "I'll bet Faye Dunaway didn't bother stealing mascara and eye shadow."

Dancy ignored his confusion of actress with role, "Well no, but who has cheekbones like her?"

"You don't need make-up, _Bandida_. You don't need clothes. You don't need money."

"Well, let's not forget our guest, huh? In the States when you get taken hostage you end up on TV."

Martillo gave up, but the boys in the back maintained a certain level of interest as Dancy searched among the little tubes and compacts, held the bank girl's chin in her hand as she turned her head critically, then started wiping off her blue eye shadow and heavy mascara. "There's a difference between foxes and raccoons, honey," she said as she started painting a new face on the girl, who seemed to relax a little under her grooming. "The whole secret of subtlety is feathering; you shouldn't be able to tell where the stuff ends yourself."

By the time they reached the commune, the girl looked beautiful (if a little pale and shaky). Taking a last stroke with a fader, Dancy dusted her hands triumphantly and handed the girl the mirror. She was shocked, then became engrossed in studying her face, trying to memorize the effects and study out the techniques. Regalado and Maldonado enthusiastically applauded the effect, but maintained a somewhat closer scrutiny of those sweet round tits poorly confined by the ripped blouse and slashed bra.

When they dropped her out in front of the cane huts, Dancy gave her a good-bye kiss on the cheek, then looked her right in the eye. "Now don't tell anybody anything about any of this, or I'll come look you up, hear?"

Martillo translated and the girl shook her head violently, and continued after the bread truck loafed off down the washed-out road. She was very sure she wanted no further part of Dancy Russell. That bitch was crazy mean. A real gift for cosmetics, though.

I didn't really plan to get back into gun-running; it just sort of happened on its own steam. I wouldn't have planned to do it because it's so dangerous. Gunrunning is not just a job, it's an adventure. And I'm not into adventure any more, I'm just a simple smuggler out to make an easy buck. But these things have a way of getting out of hand.

Sometimes things just seem to come together with a will of their own; other times they just fall to shit the same damned way. Both processes accelerate when guns, women, or money get involved. I'd long since repented of selling guns in Latin America (before NAFTA at that) but just when I backslid I had a chance to do a story on gun-running for the effete local tabloid that was my usual outlet for such "yuppie noir".

I'd been hanging with this Ofelia, a dancer in Tijuana, Well, actually she was just sort of hanging out at my apartment, but she used to bring all her friends over to show them her pet gringo. Then she'd fall asleep, or pretend to, and her buddies, who were mostly top-priced skin dancers and prostitutes, would jump my bones. What with one thing and another I was getting pretty fond of her. A lot of people were. She danced about ninety-eight percent naked in Los Patudos, which was a major hangout for various levels of gangsters, mostly sort of mid-management types. I guess. Even people involved in Mexican " _mafiosos_ " don't really know how far up it all goes or how widely it's connected. But some of those boys in the corner booth at Patudos are about as heavy as anybody I'd want to meet.

Anyway Ofelia was a hot ticket with these mobsters. I could never figure out why. She's decent looking but nothing spectacular. She's tough, but not as hard-boiled as some of those " _rucas_ ". Maybe just because she was the star dancer at the place they hung out and everybody wanted to tag up. Mexican gangstas have a fairly locked-in mindset; they all dress alike, think alike, drive the same sort of car, carry the same sort of gun, listen to the same albums. That's what makes them belong to gangs, I guess. So Ofelia knows the ones who like to pretend they're big-time _narcos_ from the ones who really are. And she prefers the real thing. She told me she likes "dangerous" men.

So she was in luck. They don't get more dangerous than this one psycho Culiacan cowboy she started seeing. He was a _pistolero_ who sort of became an independent contractor. A hired killer who couldn't keep straight who not to cross up—not the type looked up to by insurance salesmen. The first time Ofelia went to his apartment the place was littered with " _cuernos de chiva_ ", which is Sinaloa slang for an AK-47, since they think the curved magazines look like goat horns. He told her, "Baby, I've messed up bad and they're after me so we'd better have a real good time while we can." I think most girls would have been out the door before a man even finished a remark like that. But it would have started Ofelia making her own gravy.

Just her luck she wasn't around when the guy got nailed to a fence up in La Presa and shot about a hundred times, mostly about the face and crotch. But she heard about it right away. And not only was she the only one who knew where he lived, she'd copped a key. So she came to see me about it. That's when I finally figured out what she saw in me. She a whole fan club scary enough to turn her on. But how many could she trust? I do a lot of dirty work with Mexicans just because they figure they can trust a gringo more than another Mexican. And she was right—if she'd gone to one of her gangster pals with her idea, they'd have just slapped her around, boogied her, and taken it all for themselves.

She let us into the _pistolero's_ place up in Lomas, pulled the curtains and turned on the lights. For a minute I just stared at the interior decor. What you might call Narco-Deco. Everything was blood red, black or gold. Almost every non-functional object was in the shape of a naked woman or some portion, like a gold mug shaped like a tit. One whole wall was a sort of sculpture made out of beveled mirrors in gold frames, so you couldn't move without the wall buzzing and jumping with a hundred little images. The walls were red, covered with pictures of sports cars, jet fighters, Gloria Trevi naked, saints and Virgins. And a Rambo movie poster in a frame about six feet square. There must have been eight remote controls on the coffee table, which was a sheet of smoky glass held up by the knees and elbows of a naked brass woman. If I hadn't known the tenant was a Sinaloa drugboy I think I could have guessed.

The bedroom was even more of a circus, but I didn't pay much attention when I saw the guns. I suddenly realized I was standing in an apartment full of the most illegal contraband in Mexico, way worse than heroin or coke. And that if somebody came in--the owner, the mob, the cops, the _federales_ \--I'd be guest of honor at an execution-style slaying. Ofelia saw my face in one of about three dozen mirrors and started laughing. She didn't have all that much trouble talking me into helping her take the guns. No way would I have walked out of that place unarmed. I stuck a Ruger .357 and a Smith 9mm automatic in my belt under my shirt and we wrapped the rest of the stuff up in this huge red velvet bedspread with little gold Playboy rabbit beads sewn all over it. Black silk sheets he had. Two different stereo systems just in the bedroom. Oil painting of Vicente Fernandez and Elvis in mariachi drag on horseback with blazing six-guns. No dresser, just clothes on the floor, a closet full of black western wear, and boxes of bikini undies. Not to mention nine assault rifles, two Italian pump shotguns, matched Ingram MAC 10's in a presentation quality briefcase, and a dozen large caliber pistols. Also an ornate machete with an eagle handle and the blade engraved, "I Avenge Life with Death, and Honor with Blood." I still have the machete somewhere. No cash or dope that we could find. I made Ofelia carry the bundle out to my truck. I had my hands under my shirt and was soaked with sweat. We loaded up, pulled out, then just drove on home. When we got there, Ofelia was blatantly hot for my rod. I was fairly turned-on my own self.

Getting rid of the guns didn't even figure to be as hard as getting hold of them in the first place. I made about a dozen calls around San Diego and Baja before I got hold of Wally, kicking back in Cabo. I asked him if he could flog the guns, he said he could turn them in a New York minute right up in La Paz, so to come on down. And bring some American peanut butter. _No problemo._

Better yet, I quickly figured out how to pay for the trip by doing an expose on gunrunning for the incredibly gullible tabloid rag I mentioned (Okay, okay, the San Diego "Reader"). I showed them pictures of a little storefront on the main drag in San Ysidro: no sign, no markings, no windows, just a very serious steel door. I'd staked the door out and stepped in as a customer was stepping out and had surreptitious shots of the interior—all the walls and counters lined with assault rifles, big-caliber handguns, and combat add-ons. They wouldn't even make eye contact with me, but it was pretty obvious that the place, four blocks from the Mexican border and without a scrap of U.S. advertising, was selling guns headed abruptly south. Big biz, guns into Mexico. They bought the story idea, promised two grand on delivery. So far, so good.

Except when I was calling around, trying to get hold of Wally (and a few quotes from assorted smugglescum) the story threw me the kind of curve that the writer in me just creams all over but makes the vestigial human being inside me cringe. I'd gotten a pretty good lead on a surf nazi named Claypool who was a sure bet for running. I called the number but got his mother, who asked about him with a fine edge of panic and heartbreak that twisted my tail so bad I almost didn't show up in her house in La Jolla like I promised her. But I did. She gave me his picture, a thumbnail bio, and the fact she hadn't seen him in a month and was getting worried. She thought maybe he was moving drugs, which evidently he had done previously. She begged me to look out for him while I was down in Mexico—let her know. I could send the information to her since they were moving back to Houston where the old man would design weapon systems for somebody other than General Dynamics. I told her sure I would. You know, sure I would. But it gave me a bad feeling about the whole project.

Wally is a major maniac, even among the lunatic fringe of the smuggling industry, a legend in his own time-share. The first time I met him he impressed me with an evening of extremely nutso shit, culminating with Wally slamming two garbage can lids together on the head of a Mazatlán cop, then marching off clashing them together singing, "Oh the monkey wrapped his tail around the flagpole, and all the people could see his asshole," to the tune of a Souza march. There wasn't a dry eye, believe me.

But my favorite Wallylogue came down in Guadalajara. See, a major difference between selling guns and selling watches or VCR's is that nobody is going to pick up one of the watches and kill you with it. The fact that it is possible to do with a gun (remember "Terminator"?) is one reason for all the concern about security. We'd been selling low-end pistols, and I mean beaters you'd find abandoned in alleys, to this clown who was supposedly leading some Mickey Maoist cell allegedly affiliated with the insidious Tecolotes at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Fancied themselves a local _Sendero Luminoso_. Wally had a case of the ass at him for some reason. I heard there was a woman involved. There so frequently is.

Anyway, this knucklehead struts in with his grizzled teenaged henchmen and starts critiquing the merchandise he's getting at bargain-basement rates. He's bitching about the condition of one big .38 six-shooter with plastic "antler" grips so Wally loads it for him, telling him he can check it out, then starts riding him, insulting him. He's getting madder and madder in front of his shock troops and Wally manages to goad him into pointing the Buffalo Bill model gun at him. Everybody just freezes and Wally freaks out, falls on the floor crying and begging for his life. Their glorious leader just sits there, a little dumbfounded, and Wally goes completely apeshit: jumps up, starts screaming at him, cursing him, tears the shirt off him, falls down and starts biting him on the ankles and howling like a dog. The guy is pretty shook up and he's sitting there holding a loaded gun but doesn't pull the trigger. Wally starts humping his leg like a horny dog and yapping at him. Finally he gives up the mad dog act and just takes the gun away and sticks it right in the guy's ear.

By now Comandante Clown is just along for the ride, his mind totally blown. His merry men are goggle-eyed but not moving. Wally lines them up against a wall, shakes them down, takes all their money, drops their drawers, rubs one _muchacho's_ girlfriend's picture in his crotch pretending like he's coming. Then he sticks all those Salvation Army guns in their pants, which are down around their ankles, and tells them to get the fuck lost. The main Mao-Mao starts to say something and Wally starts screaming and gibbering, points the old Fanner Fifty right between his eyes and pulls the trigger. He faints. Wally had taken out the firing pin (if it ever had one) just to see if the guy had the balls to use it to steal the shipment. He was pissed off he didn't. It's seems safe to conclude that if the _Sendero Ludicroso_ is still in business they have new leadership. Wally mentioned that they haven't bought any more guns. He's pissed about that, too. Who else would buy all those old beaters?

Our main stock in trade had always been pistols—not a glamour stock like UZI's or rockets, but a staple of real-world traffic and a mainstay for revolutions. Our real business in Guadalajara (with what you'd have to call real revolutionaries) was flogging some _pistolas_ of a fairly complex pedigree, clones of Brazilian copies of the world-famous _Fabrique_ _Nationale_ /Browning 9mm automatic, stamped with numbers and names of Excam (a Miami maker noted for Destruction Eve Specials) with the guts machined in a small Seattle shop by an ex-employee of DynoTech, known for their elegant cut-down versions of major calibers. Despite what newspaper writers and other nitwits try to tell you, a great deal of small-arm manufacture is cottage industry, real SBA stuff. Why not? Guns aren't that hard to make, easier than model engines or radio-controlled aircraft. The hardest part is making sure they fit the ammo. Ammo is harder to make, but almost all shooters do their own reloading. Wally sold one band of lunatics in Honduras a standard Sears reloading press at a five hundred percent mark-up, plus about a million spent brass NATO cartridges for a ridiculous profit, even after he threw in twenty thousand primers. And they didn't bitch about the price, were about as thrilled as commie crazos ever get. But you can see why people like Wally aren't all that popular in government circles. Governments are, by their very nature, opposed to citizens having guns, drugs, or unrestricted information. The worse the government, the more they hate having guns around. The worst ones don't allow them at all. I hate to be heavy-handed about this, but maybe you've noticed that the worse our own government gets, the more you hear about gun control. Mostly from newspimps, of course, who act like the NRA is some big scary outfit with a fraction of the power of a newspaper chain. Oliver Stone is naive: the Kennedys were probably killed to promote gun control and Doctor Junior got thrown in, too, because blacks generally tend to be suspicious of honkys who want the cops to have all the guns.

But back to the Ofelia deal. Wally had it all set up by the time I drove down to La Paz. A great bunch of customers with political aspirations and rich liberal money behind them, like the _Zapatistas_. Wally had dealt himself out (except for a finder's fee, probably from both parties involved) and I would meet them and do the deal; American cash over the counter. When they showed up I was covering them with two of the AK's, held like pistols in both hands. It's just salesmanship, really. For one thing it establishes a level of professional caution and intimidation right from the get-go. And weapons always look bigger, meaner and more desirable when they're pointing at you. Once you spook them a little, they're very definitely convinced that the weapons are deadly. When I considered rapport established, I pulled the magazines out, jacked the chambered rounds across the room (another nice effect and a bottom-line convincer), then let them get a load of the goods. They bought the works. At my low, low everyday prices. If you paid full price, you didn't get it from the Grinning Gringos. Those AK's should have been worth a grand apiece down there, but they got them for half that. Like so many of your modern revolutionaries and gangsters, they didn't really understand shotguns. I let them have one, worth a grand, for two hundred and kept the other one. Like the old-school gangsters, I do understand shotguns. Give me one over a machine gun any damn day. Which was the situation when they left. They had five hombres with a pile of machine guns, I had a shotgun. They could tell I wasn't worried. They didn't hang around outside in the hall, so Wally didn't have to step out of the communal bathroom and blow them away. When we saw them hit the street with their bundles, Wally and I got in his car and headed down to Cabo for a drink and some international banking. Three days of diving and drinking and I was hotwheeling back to Tijuana. Ofelia's half, less expenses, came to about forty-five hundred. She'd been hoping for more, but understood about not being able to go upmarket from our position. She also kept out a really nice little Walther automatic worth six hundred in the States, twice that in Mexico, and its weight in pink flake during those major moments. It was just her style. I'll never forget her stalking around my place wearing nothing but boots, Stetson, and net hose with the gun stuck in the garter. Profiling for the mirror. You talking to ME, _pendejo_? Perfect: "Taxi Dancer". What I'd really like to do with Ofelia is set her up with Wally, then hang around and video tape the results. Most documentaries don't have enough sex and violence.

But there's always one last little thing, isn't there? On my way back I was doing a little more research for my big gunrunning expose. I interviewed a few old smuggling pals around Mulege, who mentioned that there might have been a gun deal go down a few months before—some fool getting burned by the _Federales_. They told me where I might be able to get some pics for the story. Out at the dump behind the cemetery. The Mulege cemetery where the big stone arch says, "Here's where all your schemes and philosophies collide with the only reality."

I didn't even have to check the plates. The minute I saw the van I knew all I needed to know about that particular angle. It sat there in the sun like a skull, stripped of all life, hope, or argument; two shotgunned holes in the windshields giving it the endzone stare. I didn't have to look inside to know it was the last landmark—end of the trail for the hodad who would be bad. I think the pellet and bullet holes in the van were after the fact, from bird hunters. They wouldn't have needed to jump him in the van, he'd have walked right up to pointblank range like Bambi high on a jacklight, never even wonder what hit him. He should have stuck with drugs. Christ, there's a twentieth century epitaph for anyone who wants one.

JoJo found the address easily enough, a rarified strip mall at the edge of the Lobo Mesa enclave, snuggled close to the wealth in order to offer boutique experiences. Syco pointed and he pulled into a parking slot he immediately recognized as perfect. Close to the front door, too far to one side to be seen from inside, easy to cut off anybody heading for Starbucks.

As he examined all the sleek, expensive cars on the lot Syco thought, this country is just a big, sweet, fat, dripping pussy, and all we have to do is grab it. Of course their humble ride didn't blend in with this environment. Stuck out like a priest's dick at a whore's confession, in fact.

But they shouldn't have to wait long. He had to admit, La Neta did a good job casing things. And this JoJo kid was good to wait with. Patient and didn't talk too much. Plus, look, he'd gotten them some Pepsi and _churros_. Solid kid. Meanwhile JoJo, who spoke almost no English and couldn't really read, was studying the storefront, trying to decipher meaning from the words "Pilates Salon". He didn't think it was the Pilate from the Bible, but who could tell?

She came out the door just after three, right on time. Slipping on dark glasses as she stepped into the full sun. A looker, all right. He took in the supple body, purposeful stride, waves of caramel hair, smart cream suit with hemline a few inches above killer calves. Gaspar's woman. If you wanted to press on soft spots, she looked like the perfect place to start.

Nan felt as great as she always did after a session at Monica's; long, loose, limber. Hungry. Just enough to nosh a brownie with her mocha latte at Starbucks, scan what passed for the local newspaper until Alfredo showed up with the car. She didn't really register the two young men getting out of the crummy gray Toyota until they headed to cut her off. Something in their gait focused her in. They were just two Latino kids wearing typical clothes and mirrorshades but something about them rang up Totally Wrong. She pulled a remote from her coat pocket, pointed it towards a nearby car and pushed the button. She pushed it three times.

Which puzzled Syco and JoJo. She wasn't supposed to have a car. They heard no answering beep, but she looked at the remote, shook it, tried again and scowled as she dropped it into her pocket. She looked at them and smiled radiantly. Syco moved within a few paces of her and took off his shades. She stopped smiling.

JoJo automatically faded to his left as Syco moved to accost the Gaspar _morra._ He pulled his glasses off, too, hung them in his belt like Syco. He looked at her and could feel the cold pressure of the pistol at the small of his back, the warm pressure of his cock in the jeans. She was the ultimate feast, no doubt about it.

She took a careful scan of Syco's face. Normal features of a Central American Indian under the waxy, brown-streaked flattop. A couple of minor scars, also normal around the barrio. Typical wetback in his early twenties. Except for the eyes. They weren't just flat black, they looked dry. As expressionless as any shark or predatory bird: windows to nothing much. Not exuding menace, which Nan found threatening in itself. These guys weren't here about a job mowing lawns.

She glanced at JoJo. A thin kid barely in his teens: short, skinny and shaved almost bald. A long, tapered face. His expression wasn't empty of humanity like the other one, it just had the stillness of somebody waiting to be told what to do. She looked back at Syco, who would be the one to say what would be done. She stood still and calm. She could wait, too.

Alfredo hadn't gone home after dropping her off. He'd driven down to the Barrio Lobo middle school and parked by the fence, watching the girls' gym classes romping around in tight little shorts. He found the sight pleasurable and relaxing, but it embarrassed him a little, too. Girls his own granddaughters' age. They were just so pert and bouncy and alive. Pretty, coltish innocence and the constant chime of girly laughter: he could watch this all afternoon. Then he heard the three shrill beeps that meant, ALARM!

He fired up the Lincoln with one hand and flipped on the GeoLocator with the other as the big car leapt backwards, spun around, and surged towards the exit of the school's dirt lot. She was still at that Pilots place. Good. He'd be there in a couple of minutes. He had his phone out and was punching some alarm buttons of his own. The fat, soft tires screamed when he hit the pavement and cut a hard left.

Syco didn't like the way the conversation was going. But he had to admire the Gaspar bitch. Even if he wanted to just slap her off her feet right here and now. Not the greatest idea here in front of all these people, but it might come to that. She was a major pain in the _culo_. "Let me say like this," he said haltingly in his painfully acquired English. "You go to Gaspar, tell him. Then we don't having to do."

"Well, if you can get in to see him, let me know how," Nan said, shaking her head in frustration. "They're just so impossible to deal with up there at that prison hospital."

"You don't getting it, do you, bitch?" The first time he'd used any language on her, but it didn't faze her at all. She just sat waiting, with her head cocked like somebody listening to a parrot. "We own that prison. Half of they inside are us."

"You must be so proud."

"Where we _come from_ , understand what I say? Our country."

"Who'd you say you were with again?"

JoJo, keeping an eye peeled for trouble while watching Syco talk with the Gaspar woman, could see that he was losing a little of his cool. She must really be full of crap.

"The Mara," Syco said gratingly. "Mara Salvatrucha. Eme ese trece."

Nan knew enough Spanish to understand MS-13, which rang a faint bell, but she stuck to projecting a wide-eyed desire to be informed. "Well, that's what you say. But everybody else who hassles me these days shows some kind of ID."

Syco stared at her for a moment, no flicker of movement in his face. Then on a _macho_ impulse he reached up to tear open the front of his shirt. Nan took in a torso completely covered with a maze of blurry tattoos. She saw the 13, the words Mara and Salva, devil horns, barbed wire, hand grenades, obscure meat graffiti that mostly said, We Be Bad, in capital letters.

JoJo, who had lived four years with guys who competed for number and ugliness of tattoos, couldn't fight his reaction to the underlying significance of Syco's tat job. It was like a boy feeling inadequacy at the sight of his father's big member. He had tats of his own, but nothing like the battle record and rankings Syco displayed. This wasn't the mindless scrawl local gangs pricked into themselves: each of those grenades meant a fatal bombing. It was a skintight rapsheet of killings and scores. Syco wasn't just the new _comandante_ of the Mara in Tijuana, the man was a big shot down in Salvador as well. Lots of guys had tats all over their hands, feet, throats, even faces and shaved heads. But Syco had a new-school, hipper thought on that.

He was looking to a future where they'd need to pass in society, was even recruiting college kids who would stay clean and help them with business and political infiltration. If he or JoJo buttoned their necks and cuffs you couldn't see any ink at all. JoJo didn't realize that another main factor with Syco was that he liked to approach unaffiliated women in nice bars, saving the tats for when they undressed him. He loved dragging civilian women down into his driving indoctrination to the world of the bangingest gang.

Nan surveyed the squalid glory of his chest and said, "Very impressive. Looks like a comic book for hoodlums. If the comic artists were religious sadists who never heard of perspective."

Syco was a hair away from going off on this _jaina_. In his coldest, most insinuating tone he said, "I could show you more of them. Even more interesting."

Nan thought a moment before speaking. "Wait, let me guess. The popular barber pole motif?"

_Barbaro_? Motive? She was fucking with him, moving in loops. He started to say something, but she went on, "Or just the standard government disease warnings?"

He was weighing whether to sort that out and come up with a response, or just grab her neck and shake her limp, when JoJo hissed, " _Trucha!_ " Alerted, he swung around to see Gaspar's Lincoln cut across three lanes and charge into the parking lot.

JoJo was already running for the car, where they had their real guns, and he was right behind him. As he swung into the little Jap piece of crap he looked back at Nan, standing on the sidewalk with one hand on her hip, shaking her head at him like a teacher watching a slow student screw up. He felt something white-hot blast from his outraged brain straight down to his crotch. Teeth clenched, he watched her wave goodbye as JoJo floored the little car into flight.

She could see that the Maras were trapped in the mall lot. There was only one exit and Alfredo, punching the big Lincoln towards the Toyota, had them cut off. Other than that, there were only storefronts and a forty foot drop-off to the arterial below. Worse yet for the little gangsters, she could see two familiar charcoal Suburbans making the turn up from the access road. She'd be interested in seeing what this pair had to say for themselves. If they lived through the next ten minutes.

JoJo spun the Toyota around the lot, looking for an exit while trying to avoid a trap by the Lincoln. He ricocheted off stylish sedans and clipped off small palm trees as he flitted around the lot. He had his pistol in his lap and Syco held both of their assault rifles ready for action. He saw a shot when Alfredo veered towards the Pilates place, and smoked his clutch heading for the exit. Then cut hard to his left to avoid a head-on collision with two Suburbans that came up the ramp side by side.

Alfredo released the door latch, so when he braked in front of Nan the door swung open by sheer inertia. Nan plopped unceremoniously onto the passenger seat and quickly swung her legs inside. Alfredo touched the gas and the door slammed shut as he punched forward, away from the three other cars in the chase. A quick glance at Nan showed that she was perfectly okay, so he circled, glowering at Lico and Chuy in the Suburbans, getting to have all the fun.

Syco jammed one of the Chinese AK-47's into the crack between his seat and the transmission hump, where either he or JoJo could get to it quick. He cleared the other one and thrust it out the window. He found the position he would hook his foot on when he leaned his upper body out the window and opened fire. They weren't going to be able to run out of this one, so they'd have to do the other. He wondered how many men were in the Suburbans. How many guns.

The lot was in a panic, people dropping bags and snatching up children, running like ants across the hot pavement. JoJo paid no attention to them, just kept tearing around looking for a way out of this. They'd trusted him to take Syco to California and guard him. He wasn't going to stop trying to do that as long as he was alive. He screamed up to the south end of the lot: nothing there but a waist-high barrier and sheer drop off down the canyon. Maybe as a last resort.

He saw the pursuing cars split, forking around him. He jerked the wheel and leaned on the rickety gas pedal, forcing between them but heading straight towards the Lincoln. He saw the window come down. A big guy inside grabbed the woman and pushed her down, then aimed a pistol at him. He saw a gap between parked cars and took it, careening between two bulbous SUV's and badly scraping them both. He didn't hear a shot. He looked straight ahead and saw what he needed. He felt Syco move and glanced to that side. He was moving to lean out the window. " _No, no_!" he yelled. _Espera_!"

He grabbed his belt and tugged him back into the car. Shocked, Syco glared at him, then looked through the windshield and braced his hands on the dashboard. A second later they plowed into the glass front of a Coldstone ice cream parlor.

JoJo had seen straight through the vacuous white tile interior of Coldstone, nothing but glass walls on three sides, to the street beyond. The Toyota took a sickening jump when it hit the curb, then plunged into the glass. The customers had been standing, staring at the live car chase, but scattered as it landed in their laps. Two weren't fast enough.

As the Toyota entered in a resounding shower of glass, its left front bumper struck a man in the uniform of a Little League umpire, knocking him under the car where a rear wheel crushed his head. The right mirror slammed an eight year-old girl in the ribs as she tried to run, hurling her into the counter hard enough to break her neck. A table flew across the store, snapping two ribs of a woman who'd come in promising herself she wouldn't break her diet. Six other patrons were severely injured by big shards of falling glass. As the car hit the glass on the far side, the teenaged boy behind the counter threw a scoop at it, bouncing it off the rear deck.

The Toyota powered through the empty chairs outside, crunched across a six inch high barrier, further damaging its suspension, and crashed down four feet of landscaped slope to the street. Where JoJo cranked the wheel hard right and the shell-shocked Toyota gamely tried to comply, but came to a skidding, sparking stop when the left front wheel simply bent under and snapped off, turning the car into a sort of sled for twenty feet.

It impressed Syco that while he, not accustomed to being in automobiles much less under Dirty Harry type maneuvers, was still getting his head together after their plummeting spin of fortune, JoJo was already out of the stricken Corolla and seeking further solutions. He grabbed the rifles and kicked open his crimped door. Looking for JoJo, he saw him running towards a Ford mini-van with his gun thrust out in front of him. He vaulted the hood and followed, an AK in each hand.

JoJo ran up to the car, which contained a mother and four children, brandishing the gun. The soccer mom, panicked, pushed the door lock button instead of accelerating through the light. JoJo screamed at her inarticulately and smashed his gun into the window, scattering it all over the kids in the interior, who were howling in terror. Syco veered to approach the passenger door. JoJo wrenched the door open and tried to pull the screaming woman out of the vehicle. He could see Gaspar's men turning down the ramp toward the street. A battered switchblade emblazoned with a gold scorpion came out of nowhere to slash the restraining straps away. He hauled the woman from the car and gave her a push that sent her reeling to the pavement three yards away.

He jumped into the seat just as Syco got the other door open and didn't bother evicting the sobbing little girl in the passenger seat, just flopped into her lap and yelled for JoJo to go. Which he was already doing. The minivan actually burned rubber for the first time in its life as he pounded the pedal to the floor. Gaspar's men had run into a mass of halted traffic at the street, piling up behind the cars that panic-stopped when the gunmen started running around. One Suburban humped up onto the sidewalk and gave chase, but was stopped by a crying woman with the knees torn from her designer jeans and blood dripping across her face. She stood in front of them and wouldn't move.

In the Suburban, Chuy looked at Martín, hunched forward over his submachine gun, and suddenly slumped behind the wheel. " _Chale_ ," he said, "she's just not ugly enough to run over."

Martín burst out laughing and the tension release swept through the other three men in the car. When Chuy lowered the window, the sudden sound of five men laughing socked the mother out of her tears. She gaped at Chuy's broad, dark face. "They took my children."

Martín stopped laughing, leaned out and spoke to her softly. "We won't chase them, lady. They have no reason to shoot or drive too fast. Or to hurt your kids."

The mother stared at him, desperately wanting to believe, hands clasped to her bleeding forehead. "Come on," Chuy said. "We'll drive you back up to the store, let you sit down while the ambulance comes."

The woman looked at him, then at the other men holding intimidating firearms. She turned and ran. Chuy looked at Martín, shrugged, and they all started laughing again.

The soccer mom burst into the gutted Coldstone, blanched at the carnage there, and started screaming. Nan stood up from where she'd been calming a young boy with a bruised leg and moved to her swiftly, pulling out her phone. "Come on, sit over here."

She led her to a chair and handed her the phone. "Here, call whoever you need to. It'll be all right, trust me. Hey, son, can I get a big cone of cherry vanilla for this lady?" Nan was a firm believer in the power of sugar to combat shock.

In the plummeting minivan, Syco had gotten the squealing girl out from under him and into the back seat, then terrorized the kids into shutting up. He turned to JoJo but didn't even have to speak. The kid said, "We're eight kilometers from the border at Otay. We can ditch the van at the McDonalds there, dump the guns, and walk across."

Syco nodded. This _chavo_ would do, by God. He turned to the children and gave them a friendly smile that utterly convinced them he was going to murder them all and suck their bones. " _Pues,_ my childs. Do you like go to McDonalds?"

They sat silently as he pondered Nan Gaspar. He realized that he admired her intensely. But he had to live this thing down. He'd had a lot of options in his mind on how to deal with her, even after he saw what she looked like. But at this point nothing would do short of making her his, breaking her down completely. That went without saying... and was largely due to his admiration of her.

The Camponeta family didn't realize it, but their crossing would be uneventful; a stroll in the park, as the Jungle Woman said. She arranged them in an order of march, young ones near their parents, his older brothers bringing up the rear, herself in the lead. She told them how it would be, told them they needed to keep quiet and obey her instantly if she gave them orders. The older cop had laughed and said they'd better listen to her. But she was serious now, on the job. She led them down from the cliff, walking in furrows eroded into the rock and dirt. It wasn't an easy walk, but they tumbled out in good shape at the bottom of a rock draw, stepped out onto a smooth sand _playa_ where a tall link fence ran out of sight in both directions. Their angel walked to a certain place in the fence and looked exasperated. Pepito came up behind her and saw that the fence had recently been repaired with shiny new links. He looked at her, at the fence. He pulled out his scorpion knife and started cutting at the chain links.

Jungle Woman smiled at him, then touched his hand, motioned to put the knife away. She reached into a bag that hung down her back and pulled out a pair of bolt cutters with sawed-off handles. She quickly cut the links in an "L"-shaped cut that allowed them to open it like a door and step through. When they passed, the hole fell shut, wasn't noticeable. The sandy patch led into scraggly brush. Pepito knew this kind of brush meant there was river ahead. He was an expert on rivers at the age of seven. Jungle Woman gave them plastic bags to tie on their feet so their shoes wouldn't get wet. She picked their way through the brush and marsh and shallow skims of water without meeting anybody or saying a word. It was here, moving on wet trails through black vegetation, that Pepito saw that she was The Jungle Woman: her silent panther moves, her twitching nose and ears, her big eyes staring right through the dark.

There was more business with fences, some crawling through and under things, but the trip was nothing like the scary stories they'd heard. Pepito realized that not everyone was lucky as they were. There were probably only so many angels to go around. They were in some sort of town, seeing cars and people, and nothing had happened. They'd made it. Pepito exulted. Then disaster swooped down on them.

The family had entered a sort of tunnel, five feet wide, between a chain fence around a place where people lived in trucks and trailers, and a long wall of corrugated sheet metal marked, SWAP MEET SATURDAY, SUNDAY and, TIANGUIS, SABADO Y DOMINGO. Pepito, still ecstatic at crossing the last river, told his brother Mateo, "These people aren't so bad. Look, they made this path for us here."

Jungle Woman laughed and said, "No, they just got tired of people like us cutting their fences, so they gave up a little right of way to protect their property." And at that moment, halfway through the "tunnel", is when it happened.

There was the roar of a horror monster and a fierce round wind. A blinding light came out of the sky to pin them to the ground by their own hard-edged shadows. The family froze, too terrified to think. They stood staring up into the smiting light from the sky. Just like chickens.

Jungle Woman didn't even look up at the helicopter that jacklighted the family. She looked quickly at the ends of the passageway. Sure enough, Pepito could see that there were uniformed men at both ends, pulling up on little motorcycles with four wheels. He saw all at once that the hospitable highway he'd commented on was the perfect trap. His family was in a dither as the _Migra_ moved in from both ends of the tunnel, big men with helmets and batons. Some of his family squatted down, some ran or jumped in fear, crying. Juanes was at the point of fainting. Pepito looked for a way to crawl over the fence, but realized they'd never make it before the men with clubs caught them. He reached into his pocket, found his scorpion knife. He glanced at Jungle Woman. She was the angel here: could she possibly cope with this?

Even as the thought crossed his mind, she was in action. She pushed his father and older brothers, yelling at them to move, to run toward the closest group of _Migra_. They balked: it was crazy to charged armed men. She yelled at them, swatted them to move. Pepito lurched forward, his knife in his hand. He ran screaming toward the _Migra,_ who stopped, startled. His family, spurred by his move, ran behind him. Jungle Woman pushed them on. She even slapped Juanes' face and pushed her into a stumbling run. They ran right at those police soldiers, everybody screaming in fear.

Jungle Woman sprinted into the lead, running past Pepito, who charged on stubby legs, his scorpion sting held out in front of him like a cavalry saber. About thirty feet from the _Migra_ , who were standing still, staring at them, she snatched the back of Pepito's shirt and swung him up on her back in one smooth, powerful motion. He grabbed her shoulders and hung on. Her leather pack was like a saddle for him, he could feel hard objects inside it. He was definitely a mounted lancer then, pointing a thirsty blade towards the uniforms. Then Jungle Woman grabbed a section of corrugated metal and pulled it out from the wall as she ran forward. It peeled away until the end hit the other side of the "tunnel". She spun and snatched a handful of the chainlink fence that was behind the galvanized steel. It opened, another of her magical doors into new worlds. Behind the chain fence were hundreds of cars, parked close together in the darkness with their lights off. The cars were all watching a movie.

The family blundered through the hole into the drive-in cinema and stopped, stunned by the sheer weirdness of it. Row on row of motionless cars, all pointed at opposite ends of the walled lot, where two enormous screens showed soundless movies. One screen showed animated Disney figures, leaping around in the sky frenetically. The other was a five story woman, naked, kneeling over a man in bed, writhing in emotion. They stared at this spectacle. In the cars, people stared back at them.

The Jungle Woman yelled for their attention. She was leaning against the section of wall she'd jammed across the pathway: men were pounding on the other side of it. She pointed, "Go over there where the lights are and wait for me. Everybody go a different way. Run. RUN!"

The Camponetas ran towards the refreshment stand, scattering among cars full of startled movie-goers. The men behind the wall section ran into it in unison and it slammed shut. She lifted her feet and the impact threw her through the chain fence into the drive-in. She steadied Pepito on her shoulders as she ran after the family. The smallest children were in their parents' arms, the older kids were dashing and turning like wild goats. Pepito turned his head to see the _Migra_ pull the steel outward and come into the huge collection of cars, running behind them. He looked up at the helicopter, veering inside the cinema and swooping overhead, shining glare down on them like God's own flashlight. Even carrying Pepito, the Jungle Woman was faster than the others, and she headed straight towards the pop stand.

Pepito felt her hard back surging between his legs as she loped through the lot, rounding cars, sometimes pounding across a hood if there were chairs or viewers in the way. He was impressed beyond his ability to conceive of it. She had shocked him with a display of daring and superhuman strength, ripping the steel away like wallpaper. Then he saw the cutaway and was even more impressed. Better than strength: she had been ready for this unforeseeable attack. She'd planned in advance, had known the path was a potential trap, had come here at night to cut these wires and work the fasteners loose. Pepito was awed, felt like peeing his pants. Which he fortunately didn't because he was still clinging to her rippling back, riding her like a movie cowboy.

The Camponetas provided a bit of distraction and unbilled entertainment bonus for the drive-in customers: a ragged bunch of wetbacks fleeing through the gaps between cars. They blundered into folding beach chairs crammed full of children. They kicked over a barbecue where big, beer-swilling dads were grilling _chorizo_ and chicken wings. They plowed into a little girl with three huge boxes of popcorn, flushing clouds of white _palomitas_ into the air. The helicopter dodged around above them, spotlighting them for the pursuing officers. The movie audience didn't like the helicopter, whose light blotted out the screen images and wiped out their night vision, any better than the Camponetas did. Clusters of children atop cars cried out in fear, confusion and delight. Horns started sounding all over the lot. People leaned out to scream at the sky, shoved obscene gestures upward. A group of sailors in a convertible threw beer bottles at the swerving chopper. One of the bottles fell onto the windshield of a "low rider" car. Four _cholos_ in head rags and wifebeater shirts erupted from the _ranfla_ , cursing. One of them whipped out a pistol and fired at the helicopter, which jumped straight up like a flea, peeled off and juttered away towards the freeway.

Most viewers had no idea why their film pleasure was being disrupted until a ragged kid or angry patrolman tore by their windows. People applauded the gasping Camponetas as they plunged through the cars, wide-eyed as spooked horses. Horns beat out Mexican beats, including the "shave and a haircut" riff, which to Latinos says, " _Chinga tu madre...cabrón_ ". A guy handed a hotdog to an amazed Marco as he stampeded by, then a stick of cotton candy to the traumatized Juanes.

Doors opened in front of running _Migra_ , piling them up. One stocky father stepped from his car and shoved two stiff arms into a charging patrolman's chest, knocking him off his feet. Winded by the run and the blow, the officer reached gasping for his gun but the father, a tattooed barrio tough, stomped on his hand. Then his nose. Other officers gave up on the chase to rescue their fallen colleague, but the tattooed father was defiant and when a group tried to subdue him, people boiled out of surrounding cars and swarmed all over them, yelling in Spanish. The ensuing rhubarb drew in all of the _Migra_ officers and over fifty movie-goers. It was featured in newspapers and TV news. Four officers were injured badly enough to miss days at work, three were disciplined. The theater threatened to sue INS. Several Chicano gang-bangers started wearing T-shirts showing a pistol aimed up at a black helicopter quartered in red crosshairs. No charges were ever filed.

But the Camponetas didn't see the events that made them anonymously notorious: Angeles formed them up at the refreshment stand, counted them quickly, and led them out through an exit with hinged steel spikes in the ground to prevent unpaid cars from entering. She herded them down the short driveway to an access road. They could hear the two-stroke whine of the _Migra_ FourRunners. Unconcerned, she hustled them across and into a ditch where a grate barred access to a five foot culvert. Whipping the bolt cutters from her pack, she slammed the husky brass padlock. The lock, pre-softened in preparation for such an event, popped open and she pulled the grate out so the family could slip into the dark, moist shelter of the culvert. Pulling it shut behind her, she reached out and popped the lock back in place. Bent at the waist, she trotted down the echoing tunnel with the family strung out behind her.

At the other end she had her way with another lock and led them out into a brushy sinkhole. She let them rest and relax, told them to take the bags off their shoes. The family looked around this leafy bower, then back into the black pipe they'd emerged from. Their breathing slowed, their postures softened. Marco said, "Now we'll never know how the movie ended," and everybody laughed. Pepito watched the Jungle Woman size them up, then pull out another pocket phone and make a call. All she said was, "Now. _La Pipa._ "

Within five minutes they heard a vehicle stop up above the brush, stand there with the motor running. Pepito snuck along behind Jungle Woman as she went up to check it out. She told him to wave the others up. When the Camponetas crawled up to street level, Pepito was already sitting in the open rear door of a rusty old panel truck, motioning them to come to him. Jungle Women held them up, fed them out in groups of two. They huddled together in the dark of the windowless truck, smelling old fish and machine oil and traces of marijuana leaf. Pepito sat near the curtain at the front, listening while Jungle Woman and the driver chatted and played _Radio Ranchito_.

They were only in the truck for thirty minutes. When the doors opened, they spilled out onto a cement patio. They stood looking around at a two story stucco structure with parking spaces and numbers on all the doors, like a hotel. On the roof was a very old sign with broken neon tubes and the name, MOTEL FRONTERA - VACANCY.

The truck driver was a short, powerful man with shoulder-length hair called Gacho. He wore knee-length shorts and a dirty shirt that said PADRES. Jungle Woman handed him money and he gave her a salute.

A slim man got out of a big new car and approached her. She counted the money he gave her and nodded to him. She waved her arm at the family: take them, they're yours. His mother and father ran to him, calling him Teo and hugging him, but the kids stayed put. The small ones had never met Tio Teoforo before and the older ones knew he didn't much care for children or displays. He waved at them in welcome and they filed by to shake his hand and thank him for paying their passage to California. He showed them into their new home, a room on the upper floor with a number seven on it and a discolored place beside it in the shape of a number one.

Pepito hung back. He walked back to Jungle Woman, who was talking to Gacho about money. He stuck out his hand to her and she shook it solemnly. She asked to see his knife. He pulled it out and showed it to her. She examined the cheap little blade, gave the boy a long look. She smiled and shook her head, handed the knife back. She said he was a brave, crazy boy, to be careful here in The North. She patted his hair, then suddenly squatted down and hugged him. Then she stepped up into the truck and Gacho started it and they drove out of the parking lot into the night. The Jungle Angel, the Pony Woman, had brought him here to thrive and left him to the task. He put his knife in his pocket and looked around his new world.

The only person outside was an interesting old _gringo_ standing beside a large basin of murky green water, pissing into it. The man nodded to him and held up a bottle with a little gold liquid in the bottom. He said, "Bottle in one hand, dick in the other. Easy come, easy go, huh, kid?"

That was pretty deep, Pepito thought, a symmetry he'd never thought of before. The old _gringo_ who could speak the language asked if his back was still wet. Pepito checked carefully then shook his head. The hairy _gringo_ laughed and shook himself off.

Pepito explained that they had no home and had come to find money and a fine place to live and the man said, "Welcome to the club." He taught Pepito how to shake hands. People don't hold your hand here: you stick out your palm and they hit it. The hairy _loco_ went to a room up the stairs. His family went to a room downstairs. It was a big room with a big bed and a place to cook and another place to wash. There was a small room to hang clothes in and that's where Pepito would sleep.

They had crossed the last water. This was the land of honey, of their legends and lullabies, their new home and life. Everything would be wonderful now. He told his father that he was welcome to the club, that he knew the handshake. So now he belonged in America.

You've seen those banks so old and fusty they still have gilded wrought iron cages for the tellers. Walnut paneling and mahogany waste baskets. Some drowsing, grey-haired security guard looking like he rode with the Earps. Bulgy old Rixler vault with a big gold wheel. Spittoons, maybe even. You get 'em in dried up little Texas towns. The lobby said as much about the financial and social conditions of Chisholm County as any disparaging audit could have implied. You expect a wire haired old banker in bifocals, vest, and sleeve garters to walk out of the frosted glass door to his den-like office any moment, comforting and sagely advising the widow of a big rancher. Maybe even some duster-clad owlhoots to bust on in, breathing through bandanas and waving hogleg six guns. Matt and Maverick and Miss Kitty setting up a Christmas club.

Well, times change, even though a lot of tumbleweed Texas towns don't get around to it. Closest you're gonna get today is Cole Haskins walking in and heading right up to the teller cage with the dust-mummied hundred year-old lady wearing navy crepe with a few ink smudges. Cutting right in front of the line like some back pasture honyock, and this on a Monday, mind you.

A few of the ladies in line didn't seem to mind Cole getting ahead of himself, because he was pretty easy on the eyes. A slightly urbanized cowboy, for all his scuffed boots and rope calluses: brave, young and handsome. His incursion into the rightful order of things earned him a bushy-browed dirty look from the old bat in the moldy teller cave, and she didn't lay it off any when he hit her with his sundowner grin. She was too offended to even speak when Cole sidled up to Carl, the local saloon owner, who was fixing to make his deposit. And bold as brass said, "Scuse me, cousin, can I cut through here? Bit of a hurry."

That loosened her tongue and waspish old attitude, for sure. "Please wait your, turn, sir." Butter wouldn't have melted off that "Sir", even in August.

The barkeep looked up from writing the slip for the cash the roughnecks and cowhands had flushed him with all weekend and frowned slightly. "Hold your horses, pal. I'm right in the middle of something."

"I just can't see as it matters much, frankly." Cole tipped his crimped-brim Stetson to the scowling teller. "This being a stick-up and all."

The teller gasped and quailed back from the window. The guard, more alert than he looked, came up out of his chair, slapping leather. But Cole whirled, brushing back his jacket in a Sundance move and whipping out a big Bisley grip revolver with shocking speed. That guard had been around in his younger day and knew The Drop when he saw it. He came out of his crouch, raising both hands. Cole motioned almost graciously with the big .45. "Just toss your pistol over in that planter, there, if you like."

The guard complied without visible emotional reaction, keeping his hands in sight. Cole turned to the two frozen tellers, the bald septuagenarian in gold wire rims and real cufflinks as petrified as the old bat. Cole gave them another aw shucks grin, but they didn't show any sign of warming up, so he waved the hefty handgun again and told them, "Can't think of nothing original, so just, you know... put the cash in a nice sturdy bag." The chrome-dome unfroze first, pulled out a canvas money sack and started stuffing it with greenbacks.

Cole turned to the wide-eyed customers, sweeping off his hat like a Confederate cavalryman, his sun-blonde hair spilling down around his ears. "And if ya'll could just drop your valuables right there in John Stetson, that'd do just fine."

He did a pass down both lines, getting watches and wallets. When the street door clicked, he was covering it before it even opened, then had to give another barrel wave to get the slicker in a western suit and turquoise bolo tie to close it behind him. The man was calf-eyed in front of the gun, strongly suspected of having just wet his pants. Cole had to walk over to collect his wallet and pocket watch, almost had to haul the bolo off him. Leaving only the bar owner, who had his arms wrapped around his leather zip bag of banknotes and was looking less stubborn than just plain locked-up.

Amused, Cole gestured with the revolver, starting to run short of movie flourishes to get these heifers to comply. The barman tightened his grip, shaking his head woodenly. Cole sighed, tipped the hat full of loot back on his head, and stepped over to the cage to hold the muzzle of the Colt to the guy's nose while dragging the case out of his clutches. He let it fall open, and whistled appreciatively at one great big passel of cash.

Coming to grips with his loss, the businessman muttered ruefully, "More in there than you're rakin' from the bank, Hoss."

"Looks like it from here," Cole affably agreed.

"Don't suppose you'd let me finish my deposit?" the publican said without a whole lot of hope. "I was first in line, after all."

His surprise was evident when Cole drawled, "Okay, cousin, but make it snappy, will you?"

Oozing relief, he gave a weak smile. "I've got my slip made out and everything."

The granny teller dumped a till into a plastic trash bag, knotted the top and pushed it over the counter at Cole, who nodded at his victim. Who quickly handed over his deposit slip.

A robbery was one thing, but blatant violation of bank policy steeled the old nanny. "Sir, we can't possibly accept..."

Cole grabbed the bag and pointed his gun right in her face. "Accentuate the possible, my mama used to say."

Shuddering, the teller took the slip, hit register keys, and handed out a receipt. The businessman handed her the clutch full of bills and Cole immediately took it back. "There ya go. Now it's just between you and him and the FDI of C."

Backing towards the door with the money case under his left arm and the trash bag in the same hand, Cole touched his hat brim with his gun hand. "Many thanks to each and all, and a fond adios."

Anybody who thought the bank lobby looked antiquated, dusty, and sleep-ridden would have been further rewarded by the street outside. A somnolent desert burg dreaming of attaining ghost town status, it evoked bygone TV westerns with its old fashioned glass storefronts and second story false fronts, broken only by a few dark brick edifices once fine and proud enough to rate dates on their curved granite keystones.

The only activity was a desultory argument between two grade school boys at the main corner, the larger dominating a tussle over a beaten skateboard. The argument was pacified by the arrival of a fifteen year-old patrol car, the boys hiding their hands and averting their eyes as a weary-looking cop in his fifties got out and confronted them. As soon as he started his kindly interrogation, both kids produced fingers, each pointed at the other.

Excitement enough for this little hamlet, but it was immediately eclipsed when Cole stepped out of the bank at the next corner; carrying a trash bag, the leather money case, and a big old shooting iron. The cop reacted at once, grabbing the two kids--scaring the hell out of them since they had not seen Cole, just a police officer snatching them up--and shoving them into the shelter of the corner.

The driver's door of the cruiser slammed open at once, a stocky officer in his late twenties popping out; shouting into a microphone in one hand while the other hand swung a shotgun over the roof of the car. Sheltered by the corner of the brick dry goods store, the older cop also pulled his sidearm, thrilling the two brats to the point of jumping up and down with their fists in their mouths.

Hearing the rasp of the shotgun's pump, Cole stepped between two diagonal-parked cars and laid his gun over the hood of one. He was sighting in, sizing up, and awaiting the next move when the trash bag in his hand exploded into a splashy burst of green bills and orange dye. Simultaneously an old domed iron alarm bell on the bank's façade started a truly obnoxious clamor. Sirens could be heard nearby, and getting even nearer by.

Holding the gun pointed, sprayed with sticky international orange dye, Cole gaped at the money spilled all over the street. The omnipresent West Texas wind blew it down the street, fluttering into drifts along the face of the bank. Opening the money clutch, he started grabbing money off the sidewalk with his gun hand and stuffing in into the slit opening in the bag.

Down the block, the younger cop fired a warning shotgun blast. Cole snapped erect and popped off a quick shot that hit the shotgun, almost a block away, right in the receiver, bashing it out of the cop's hands. The older cop stared in wonder at the shot, then returned fire as another squad car pulled in at the near corner, two backup cops jumping out to draw down on Cole. Who kept on grabbing money up and stuffing it into the case and his pockets. He continued down the sidewalk, covering his movement with occasional snapshots at the Law, spooky quick and incredibly accurate. He snatched up more money from the orange-smeared piles in front of the bank.

He had just bluffed the backup cops into ducking behind their car with a fancy juke move when the front window of the bank blew out and he went down amid the sleet of old-fashioned violet glass pellets, hit twice and bleeding. The security guard stood inside the ruined window in a police academy shooting crouch, but when Cole rolled over and returned fire, he flattened out on the floor.

Cole rolled to his knees, groveling up more cash, but a solid hit by the younger cop toppled him against the front wall. He pushed himself along the wall, staggering in a stoop to shovel up more money in between pointing his gun at the cops. Hit in the thigh, he went down again. Moving like a striking rattler, he snapped off a shot that drove both the backup cops to dive behind their car, but there was no report. He had come up empty.

Struggling to his knees, he inched along the wall, fumbling for cash and pointing his pistols at the cops. They ducked a few times more, then cautiously moved from cover, converging to surround Cole as he oozed along the wall, painting it with two streaks of blood as he scooped bills into his waistband.

All four officers approached Cole, pointing pistols at him with both hands, staring in disbelief as he grimly grabbed up cash, spinning shakily to point his gun first at one, then the other. They relaxed a little, glancing at each other in sheer amazement. What will it take for this hotshot to realize it's all over?

At which point an over-powered, chromium yellow, late model Mustang arrived somewhat spectacularly at the scene, bombing up onto the sidewalk to clip all four cops off their feet. It screeched to a stop, hurling the passenger door open right in front of the slumped Cole Haskins.

He lurched to the door, tossed in the clutch of money, and pulled himself painfully into the seat, smearing it with bright orange dye and dark red blood. He reached out for more of the money eddying in the prairie wind, and took a shot in the upper arm from inside the bank.

The driver of the car, a gorgeous, built and somewhat terrifying young brunette named Bunny Beaumont, leaned over from the wheel, pointed a large automatic pistol with extension magazine through the window and touched off a barrage that blasted out the remaining glass and eliminated further resistance. She screamed in a pronounced East Texas accent, "Get your feet in Cole! Get _in_ , damn your sorry butt! _Cole_!"

Groaning, spurting blood from a half-dozen sites, Cole lugged his legs inside. Bunny immediately stomped on the gas and the car lunged down the sidewalk, the door slamming shut from sheer momentum.

At the corner, Bunny barreled the car off the curb, impacting and demolishing the disputed skateboard, and blasted noisily towards the classic Western escapade direction, Thataway. Behind her the two boys, now welded into eternal friendship by having mutually witnessed the bitchinest thing that ever happened in their nowhere little burg by chorusing, "AWESOME!"

Bunny, steady and steely-eyed when wheeling getaways, performing vehicular mayhem, and pot-shotting your occasional law officer, was losing it as she floored the car out the desolate stretch of two-lane blacktop leading significantly south. Fighting panic at the site of blood flowing copiously from Cole's various perforations, she waved her pistol like a conductor's baton, attempting to direct the movement towards Life and Light. "Don't you even think about dying on me, Cole Haskins," she yelled. "You make one dying move, I'll blow your damn head off. You hear me, Cole?"

Pale and hunched on the seat, smearing blood on the passenger window, Cole dragged his focus to the living world, and the yawing highway they were skimming along at over a hundred and thirty. "Watch your driving, Honeybunny. We don't need no accidents in this damn town. They're mean here."

"Shut up, Cole Haskins," Bunny bawled. "You die on me and I'll kill you within an inch of your no-good life!"

Cole moaned, not all his misery physical. "I can't believe I left all that money lying in the street."

" _Money_!" The concept made her livid. "Money? Goddam you, Cole!"

She hauled off to hit him with the gun but he coughed wetly, blood dribbling down his chin, and she dropped it onto the seat, her eyes wide and pained. She turned her attention to the road, pouring on even more speed, jabbering, "Shut up, Cole. Just shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up."

Cole nodded understandingly, said "Believe I will," and passed out, cash gripped in his fist.

Bunny bit her lip until it was also bleeding, leaning forward as she tore along the hardtop, racing in search of some kind of Plan B. When she passed a weathered four by four supporting a bullet-riddled sign proclaiming, LEAVING CHISHOLM COUNTY, she whipped the wheel savagely to the right, the pitchpoling signpost giving the stolen Mustang the first scars and dents of its pampered existence.

Jerome, wearing his Last Call face and demeanor, looked up dispassionately when Casey entered, slamming both doors open with the dolly to present a spasmodically twitching Wiley with hell in both eyes and foam oozing out from under the silver tape across his mouth. "Sorry, no recycle here. Dispose of him in the proper bin."

The denizens took in Wiley with the Zen calm a night of hammering cheap booze can produce. Jasper ventured, "Service entrance in rear."

Cathilda whinnied, "No in-flight refueling."

Strack rumbled, "That extreme skateboard games shit was last week."

Casey looked around at the Mimosa and its fauna, far from reassured. She set herself up for more self-castigation by being glad she had the gun.

Jasper approached Wiley curiously, examining him like Lord Carnarvon peering at a mummy prepped for cultural looting. "Not a bad ride, Hoss," he decided. "A rig like this could solve a lot of problems for a lot of folks."

Wiley gibbered and gnashed beneath the tape. Coming to the realization, Jasper reached up and yanked it off with a helical _voila_ move. Wiley howled like a gutshot coyote. Jasper looked down at the tape, which now depicted a map of Wiley's nape hair, mustache, and soul patch. "Oh, yeah. Sorry Bro."

Turning to Casey, he bowed. "Howdy Ma'am. I'm Jasper. That's Jerome behind the bar about to chuck us all out. And all those damn drunks over there."

"Hi. I'm Casey. Can you help me get this man functional?"

Cathilda wavered over to consult. "I doubt it, honey. That Spanish Fly stuff is bogus and Ginseng takes too long. Have you got any poppers? IV Viagra?"

The irregulars were crowding around Wiley, giving Jerome an opportunity to scoop up all their glasses without a fight. Wiley slavered at them, trying to bite anybody who got too close. One such lunge tipped the dolly and he whammed down on his back again, knocking him breathless.

"Okay," Casey asked wearily, "Now what?"

"Depends on what you want to accomplish," Jerome said. "In the next eight minutes."

Wiley got her attention by shyly booting her in the calf. She leaned over, straining to hear his labored words. Which were: "Calls for decompression. Gotta be done just right or I get the bends. And the kinks and heebie-jeebies."

Casey looked at Jasper with such palpable helplessness that Jasper patted her shoulder consolingly. "It's all right, Lady. This happens all the time."

Despair surfacing in the post-action lull, Casey murmured, "He has to write something for me. Or I'll kill him."

Which reminded her. She pulled out the pistol, causing Jerome to put his hands under the bar and regard her with an animal alertness. The patrons showed little reaction. Jasper shook his head sadly. "Won't work."

Horrified, Casey gasped, "No, no. I'm not going to shoot him. I just want you to dispose of..."

Jasper nodded, "Nope. Like I said, that gun won't work. Smokin' Joe got so cute cutting it down it won't fire anymore. Wiley just carries it to..."

Cathilda stomped on his instep. Jasper yipped, then looked hangdog. "Yeah, right. Anyway. Here, let me take it."

Casey held the gun out, hanging between her fingertips. Snorting, Cathilda snatched it and dropped it into the bottomless sea of her cleavage.

From the bar came the ragged voice of Strack. "You want to get him up and ready for action like right now, affirm?"

"Six minutes, max," Jerome intoned.

"No problem," Strack croaked. "Pure logistics. And ordnance." He wheeled around the bar, one hand spinning his wheels and the other holding a shot he'd hidden from Jerome. He surveyed Wiley's lash-up professionally. "Not bad. Small wheels though. You want to race afterwards?"

Casey shook her head, so Strack shrugged and pulled some arcane paraphernalia from the nylon bag on his useless knees. He held up a convoluted, combat-ready clump of hardware and smiled at it proudly. "Technology. That's what toppled the Russkies. You think they could build something like this?"

Casey doubted it, but didn't yet see why they would want to. The Mimosans all nodded at her, basking in second-hand pride over what had been wrought and was capable of more wroughting on further notice. Flipping levers and valves, Strack walked her through a catechism of his _deus ex megabonk._

"Okay, the business end here came off a standard respirator." Casey could now see that what she'd thought was some obscene sex gadget was a flesh-colored shroud to fit over mouth and nose. "Connected directly to the Main Chamber here." Which opened like a rifle breech to reveal a burnt interior. Strack touched a stud on the side of the device and a coil in the chamber glowed cherry red. "Electric ignition," he said proudly. "Nine volt". A mutter of praise ran through the crowd. Pulling a tube with enameled dragon from his shirt pocket, he carefully poured some fine grains of what looked like yellow sand into the breech, then sealed it. "Lebanese hash," he commented. "Crumbles up like sandstone."

Toggling open another chamber at the rear, he showed her a screw-down tensioner. "Drop an amyl nitrate cylinder in the Propellant Chamber," he told her, "Lock and load. Or nitrous. Different payload, but you get operating pressure either way."

He whipped what looked to Casey like a CO2 cartridge out of a cross-breast bandolier, slipped it into the cylinder and ratcheted it down. "Now this," he went on, "is optional, but advisable for this circumstance." He opened another small chamber with polished chrome interior and pulled on a string around his neck to tug a titanium charger engraved with the Special Forces out of his collar. He positioned it over the chrome chamber and tumped in a few righteous jolts of coke. The crowd titter this time had a harder edge on it.

Strack sealed the cocaine chamber and adjusted a small set screw. "The Induction Chamber works on pure carburetion," he said, checking Casey for comprehension. "You know; Venturi principle, all that?" Casey nodded dumbly.

"So," Strack concluded, "Push this button and the hash ignites, hit this one and the amyl blows through the barrel, forcing the smoke out through the aspirator with a fine jet of some damn decent Peruvian toot." He held up the gizmo, which Casey now saw as freighted with catastrophe like a loaded torpedo. "Ta, daaaa. The Bongzilla, reporting for duty."

"Five minutes!" Jerome barked.

Jasper tipped Wiley back up to vertical hold. He looked like home-made dogshit. Strack rolled up, wheel to wheel with Wiley, and extended the mask. Wiley bowed his head as gratefully as any communicant, making a tight seal around his breathing orifices, aided by the remnants of the duct tape.

Strack touched the lighter stud, paused, then pulled the trigger for the propellant. The Bongzilla emitted a low, implosive hiss. Strack toggled the trigger, producing explosive puffs like a steam locomotive. Glancing at Casey, he moaned, "Wooooooo, wooooo! I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." over the chug, chug, chug. Turning back to Wiley he said, "You're on the Peace Train, now, Brother." Wiley's chest inflated, his eyes bugged out. Casey could have sworn smoke blew out his ears. When he started gagging and thrashing, Strack withdrew his portable gas chamber and observed the results with scientific detachment.

Casey saw no improvement in the situation. Wiley, supercharged from the nuke hit on his plundered store of brain chemicals, was not responding. It was obvious to any experienced observer that the fury of the neurological storm had turned inward, poking tight twisters of havoc into cellars best left unexploded, avidly seeking out the fragile trailer parks of higher reason. She looked a question at Strack, who shrugged, "It's pure science. You want to apply it, you need to have some expectations."

"I need for him to give me a column." She met the circle of uncomprehending eyes, tugged out her recorder and waved it. "I need three thousand words in five hours," she yelled.

"Wrong," Jerome answered her. "Three minutes."

The denizens had it sussed out now. "Oh," they chorused, "A rant!"

Jasper nudged her, said, "You have to pull his chain." Casey glared at him.

"Crank him up," he clarified. "Get him started."

"Yo, Wiley," Cathilda purred mischievously, "What you think about Safe Sex?"

Wiley's eyes snapped open, pools of sardonic venom. " _Safe Sex_!?!?" he screamed. "Don't even get me started on that steaming pile of malicious misanthropy."

Strack leaned over to hit the "On" button of Casey's recorder, which she held up like a contrite Catholic virgin offering a candle to her star-crossed Savior while Wiley raved out of control.

When the gigahit from the clusterbong died out, he slumped in his bonds, his verbal spew trailing off like a Walkman on the last few milliamps of its Energizer AA's. His head lolled forward. Drool dripped on his shoe and bare foot.

Jerome slammed the bar and bellowed, "That's it. Get your raunchy red asses outta here!"

### SAFETY COMES PREMATURELY

By The Weekend Warrior

My position on sex is Male Superior. And my favorite male superior position is called 68. You go down on me and I owe you one. That's as safe as sex gets and it involves sticking sensitive, irreplaceable components between sharp teeth. Safe sex is a myth! They want you to believe it's safe so they can use it to sell you worthless junk.

Listen, I'm no prude, for crissakes. I receive the ministrations not only of columnist groupies, but also the old, the young, the incapacitated, the begrudging, the easily duped, the elated, unrated, inflated, animals (both stuffed and previously unstuffed), vegetables, minerals, leather and several modern synthetics of arcane properties, machines, chains, chain letters, chain letter sweaters, footwear, underwear, everywear, anywear, hardware, software, artificial intelligence, intelligent artifice, unintelligible artifacts, milking parlors, prods (both stock and custom), mammaries, memories, murmurings, prostheses, French ticklers, German sticklers, and Oriental pricklers that give tickling a whole new slant.

In short, whatever gets you through the night. Lech and the world leches with you, kvetch and you kvetch alone. Not that "alone" is without erotic possibilities. Best not to rule anything out, is the rule of thumb. In fact thumbs themselves can be sugar plumb fairies: there are cults of digital freaks who spraypaint "Thumbs Rule" on freeway ramps. Find your personal fetish through the process of elimination. In fact, that process itself... but I'm sure you get the idea. Several maybe. If so, send them in care of The Week. If your obsession is chosen, you could qualify for my Queen For a Day Special, a ride on ol' Jumpin' Jack Flash, his own bad self.

It's not my job to educate anybody. I just wanna be your lover, not your limpdick fascist boss. I want you to have my multi-headed love child. I just want to give up all my crazed, retardo, muskrat love. I just wanna to be your everything, be your macho man, be your teddy bear, your handy man, your salty dog, your smooth-up criminal, your overnight sensation. I just want you to be my party doll, my inflatable date, my meat puppet, my lip-smacking, ham-slammin, joint-jumpin, nipple-nibblin', boogy-woogy foo' . See what I'm saying?

But don't try to tell me any of the above is safe! There's nothing you can put on to make it safe, no pills you can take, no advice from the wise. Most of those just make it more dangerous, actually. In a safe world condoms and diaphragms would come equipped with emergency airbags. Don't think "cybersex" is safe, either. The oxymoronically-named "Virtual" sex. Punching up smut on your laptop or fax machine. If all you can get on top of your lap is a computer, buddy, you've got problems. The micro, soft syndrome. But what pops up when you're browsing seemingly innocent sites like CatholicCradleRobbing.com? Click Here To Meet Personal Dates. Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!

It's the spot market for Proper Genitalia, eBay for biohazards. And don't even think about handing me that, "Oh, no. It's all about companionship." You can get companionship in a pet store. But they all play the game: "Friends First". Okay, sure, honey. "First" meaning, before _what_? Eh? All this platonic crap. To me, platonic friends are the kind you met in Plato's Retreat. But the game is to pretend that for platonic soul mates, Proper Genitalia doesn't matter. Well, here's the scoop. It _does matter_. Look at the top of the webpage: Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Men, Transsexual Cross-dressing Masochists Seeking Highly Confused Dudes. But see, it's not like "Seeking Whatever". One touch of an Improper Genitalia and you find out It Matters. Don't search the engine if you don't have a clear idea of what you are ISO.

All those code letters are a bad sign, right there. But at least we know what ISO means. Interested in Sucking Off. Some of these little codes in the ads are like, what is it? What does this bitch want from me? Okay, SWF, we know that one, we saw the movie. Means she looks like Brigit Fonda. Or maybe it means Super Wack Freak. Just right for some AMF.

Here we got all these women looking for an LTR. What? Little Tickle in the Ribs? Love Triangle Rumble? Lowdown Twisted Rutting? Whatever, I'm there for it. Long as there's no commitment involved. Another thing they're all ISO, is stable. Spelled just like sounds: $table. Very self explanatory.

Then we get to HWP. I figured that stood for Ho With Problems. Or possible Ho With... Hmm, what starts with P? How about Proper Genitalia? Then I found out it means Height Weight Proportional. Like this is a big deal. Whoa, that babe is really proportional! Look out sweetie, I'm proportioned like a horse. Hey, is Barbie HWP? Hell no. Would you have sex with her? You bet you did. Or Jessica Rabbit. Or probably even Calista Flockhart. Hey, check out Wilt Chamberlain. Far cry from HWP, okay? And he apparently did a different woman every 9.7 minutes from the time he was nine.

The problem is, what do you say if you're _not_ HWP? Shamu look-alike? Roseanne Class Cruiser? Welterweight runt? No, you've got all these vague categories like "Dieting". "Pleasantly Plump". "Big Beautiful Woman". You gotta hope for at least two out of three on that one. Or "Lots Of Me To Love". Great: Single, White, lots of me to obsess over and harpoon and drown your whole crew.

Here's a few guidelines for these displacement classes. Just try this simple test. Have her sit on your face. If she's "Dieting" you can't breathe. "Rubenesque" and you can't see. If you can't hear, she's a "Big Beautiful Lot To Love". If you can't survive, she's an obese pig and what the hell were you thinking?

What's wrong with a little truth in advertising here? Like, "SWF, sloppy fat, but I sure can cook and I've got a proper genital and know how to use it.

So tell me. _Does any of that sound "Safe" to you_? Or some treacherous bait/switch scam aimed at stringing you up, looting your finances and emotions, then gutting you out into societal fish sticks? While infecting you with some strain of incurable, transmittable, death-dealing cooties and serving you with papers to support a dozen ill-conceived little bastards brainwashed to call you Pappy?

Next time you're thinking stinky and assume you'll get away unscathed, ask yourself three questions approved by the Solana Beach Police Department:

1. Would Jesus do anything this disgusting?

2. Do you have an exit strategy?

3. What year was the Battle of Hastings?

That final question is a mere bagatrix for those lucky enough to have attended a reasonably cogent school district prior to the drugs and rap era. The rest of us (or what's left of us) share my personal experience; that those ignorant of history are duped to repeat it. Same deal with Math and English, I discovered.

The latter was a particular disappointment at the time, since I had assumed the course would teach me how to speak more like the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Fortunately, rock and drugs did that for me anyway, but by then I had slipped into one of those odd little psychic traps institutions lay for the underly wary and ended up becoming an English Major. That was disappointing, too, since I expected to get a short clipped accent and mustache to match, but I did learn how to say "Leftenant" and "Stand Easy". Not to mention the names of a baffling bevy of heavy old weirdos like Chaucer and Milton, who could barely write English themselves. That Chaucer was the hip-hopper of the day. Should have sung that gobbledygook and called himself Tew Lyve Crewe. Acid Chause, cuz.

But I digress. Or had you already noticed that? The important thing to remember is: sex is spelled Danger! At the very least it makes you sleepy and stupid. It causes babies, who are eating us out of house and home. You can catch disease, wives, lawsuits, your death. Bottom line: how safe can anything be if you have to do it with women? Never trust women. Without them, I'd be on top: have God-like powers and the reach of empires. Instead of working for some miserable rag, surrounded by itinerant gophers and forced to flog my priceless (or at least cut-rate) wisdom to any semi-literate dipstick who cares to pick it up for free.

So, you get the general idea. And about time. Remember that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Except perhaps a bull rhinoceros just about to come. In other words, nothing, but nothing can stop the Duke of Earl. Layeth not boogie-woogie on the Warlord of Weekend.

Casey didn't know whether to be proud of what she had snatched from the jaws of a looming deadline or humiliated. The more she thought about it, the more alternative ways of feeling about it occurred to her. None of them self-actualizing.

At about the time I quit the PI I ran into a book called "Evidence" and was very impressed. The book contains nothing but forensic shots--eight by ten glossies to be presented in court--culled from the thousands of such shots that are made at crime scenes or in police studios, hermetically stored for trials, and eventually discarded. Each shot is a mystery in itself; what was the crime, what does this hammer or car seat have to do with it? The technical skill is impeccable, a reminder that police photographers also  develop their professional skills and, without Art or "scoop" or significance to motivate them, can perfect their craft in a very pure manner.

Another interesting aspect of "Evidence" is the way in which these photos, devoid of anything but the subject and with an inscrutable viewpoint on that, resemble nothing more than exhibits of Art photos in galleries. That idea titillated me and, though my own work was moving away from flat facts in black and white, I learned something from the book, something to do with the integrity of subject and materials. I mused on the idea of a similar book, but with the shots set up in a studio; would they look different, and how? I've got one of my prints here that is actual evidence from a crime scene.

Renee was the shyest and quietest of the girls that clubbed around the house of Usher. She smiled and laughed, but ventured little. She was beautiful in a very elfin way, delicate features set on her oval olive face and ringed with dark curls. Somewhat short, she had a slim figure and, at fourteen, showed promise of developing into full-blown beauty. I enjoyed teasing her because she was so painfully shy. I remember bringing home a single of "Don't Walk Away, Renee" by the Left Banke, then putting in on at a party. Renee blushed under the eyes that darted her way at the chorus, fidgeted, then ran from the room. Five minutes later she came back, smiling, but still blushing. She took such kidding well; was a simple, gentle girl whose main pleasure was smoking a little pot then hugging her knees by the fire and listening to music or other people's conversation. I have this snapshot of her, come to think of it, in that very pose. Future Heartbreakers of America.

I was sitting by the fireplace cleaning lenses one night when  Charese burst in, demanding my shotgun and car. I questioned her and she told me straight-out what was on. I got the sawed-off and a .38 caliber snubnose that had been left in the house and we drove off.

Renee had been snatched off the street by six guys, members of a black street gang. They'd taken her to this motel on NW 15th; to this room, number 9. Where they'd forced two hits of LSD down her throat with slugs of whiskey then tormented her; stripping her, whipping her, enjoying her terror until the drug took effect. When she was completely high, they started raping her in earnest, taking turns singly and in groups throughout the afternoon and early evening. After several hours their vigilance relaxed and Renee, though naked and still very high, was able to jump out the bathroom window, tumble down through the briars and blackberries until she got to a street and found a phone to call Charese.

Who immediately dispatched a squad of friends to pick her up and take her to the hospital, but not without getting the room number of the motel. She ran to my place and we ended up screeching my van into the motel parking lot, jumping out and walking up to that door, not even hiding the guns. The door was locked when Charese tried it, me covering her. So I stuck the sawed-off up to the lock, pulled the trigger, kicked the remainder of the door flat against the inside wall, and stepped inside for the kill. The room was empty. There was  blood on the sheets, trash and torn clothes on the floor.

Renee sunk back into her family, again a hurt child, and was whisked off to another city. I never saw her again, although some of the kids got occasional updates. Evidently she was all right. And, oddly, not so shy anymore.

Later I tried to approach that door with my camera in the same frame of mind I approached it with the shotgun, mostly to take a picture that showed that foreboding, that certainty of cold-blooded extermination. That's why this shot comes in at an angle like this, making everything obtuse; the doorframe, with the door leaning inward, a corner of bed seen past the door's edge--distorted by the bite taken out by the buckshot. Everyone who sees the shot knows it's a crime scene, most guess it was something sexual--a jealousy killing, a rape. I have wondered whether I could set up a shot that would impart that same information without the situation being real. I've also wondered if I could talk myself into that killing determination without the real stimulus that created it. The evidence I keep is the memory of firing that gun and kicking that door, then stepping in through the smoke and dust, Charese at my shoulder, the shotgun's snout panning the room like a bloodhound's muzzle.

It was on just such a morning as this that Cullen first hatched his unwholesome, unconscionable, and not wholly unattractive plan. Winter days here on the Cape--with their unrelieved gray of sea and sky, damnable damp and chill, and empty pleasure domes--can inspire desperate schemes and Cullen is, by nature if not always by circumstance, a desperado.

In fact, the recent dismissal of my latest novel had led me into desperation myself-- psychological, matrimonial and, most regrettably, financial. Imagine, then, my reaction upon turning from my brooding, solitary, and occasionally angry flute concert for the noncommittal sea to find Cullen perched on the seawall, wrapped in a disreputable morning robe, and offering invidious commentary.

"Jean Paul Rampage, I presume?," he sneered affably down a few yards of patrician nose rendered erose by gallons of spirits, dozens of slammed doors, and countless fists of behorned husbands, perplexed producers and avenging angels.

"Very droll, Cullen," I replied, rather embarrassed to have had an audience for my musical over-reaching, "Surely even an amateur can attempt Bach uncritiqued here on this--until recently--solitary beach?"

"Occasionally Bach, but more Offenbach," Cullen was unrelenting as usual, "Shouldn't one wear a bathing suit while practicing bathos? Surely overblowing need not mean overblown? Pray continue...'Tales from the Vienna Sausage', perhaps. Or maybe 'Eine Kleine Nicht Music'?

I shifted my bulk uncomfortably. "What can I do but practice, Cullen?"

"What, indeed? Practice should make one, I believe, perfect--not perverse," Cullen surveyed me like a headmaster, probing my frayed garment of feigned indifference. "I can only point out that, by subtle mannerisms of which you are totally unconscious (though they are glaringly obvious to me) that my analysis of your Euterpian endeavors has unsettled your spirits and made you defensive."

"Good defenses make good neighbors," I grumbled, wistfully envisioning the beach between my cabin and Cullen's ringed with concertina wire. "Especially when the neighbors are offensive."

"Only if one takes offense," Cullen clipped out in his best angular, Anglish manner, "Actually, old chub, your performance was quite adequate considering you are an amateur restricting your airs to a lonely stand of sand. But that is totally beside the point."

The idea that Cullen might have a point to grind gave me a moment of queasy dread. After seven years of seasonal neighborship with the cadaverous madman, I had learned a healthy aversion for the gambits spawned in that thatched skull. And try to keep them from intruding into my own humbler, if handsomer, head. No doubt some dire game was afoot--Cullen was almost sparkling as he perched there, his predator's eyes alight. As I usually find his play fairly banal, I ostentatiously refrained from asking the intricacies of his latest idiosyncrasy. A feeble omission--the subject had already, in some way, been broached.

"The point," Cullen blandly continued, "Is that my unsolicited comments did little to illumine. Nor to clarify, expand, expound, explicate, or express. I have done nothing for the arts, nor the scholars, nor the listeners, nor even what little might have been done for the music itself. Yet I have made you feel bad. Perhaps adversely affecting your next performance, due to your doubtless decrease in self-confidence."

"Only on the unhappy chance that you might be around to hear me."

"Granted, my concern would diminish if sheer proximity were you not forcing me to listen," Cullen admitted, "But my point is that I, as an artist, think that you, as an artist, are reacting incorrectly to the way others react to your reactions to the world. In short, you have a crippling attitude towards criticism."

"Cullen, I have a crippling attitude towards critics. It is easy for you, doing your show business folderol. I have to live with--and worse, by--the opinions of those vultures. Cripple them all, I say. Let them read my books in traction, try to type with steel hooks, fumble for their programs with plaster appendages, take weeks hobbling back to their dens of slander after each performance. Break them on the wheel. Crush their perfidious fingers."

"You could do with a more constructive attitude," Cullen counseled.

I was getting uneasy about the direction Cullen might be taking but, in a moment of temporary instability, decided to further clear up my attitudes anent the critical structure, academics, culture vultures, reviewers, pedants and pundits.

"Cullen", I began, packing up my flute and shifting my short but ample frame into a more serious lecturing position, "Those who dabble in the art and science of writing without actual talent are like young boys who, without having the skills to compete, make detailed study of athletic endeavors; memorizing the numbers of points, the dreary statistics, the weights and heights and salaries of hundreds of athletes and even endowing stadiums full of hulking young thugs--all without being able to run five yards without cardiac infarctions. Such individuals are capable of plausible rhetoric, but not comprehension. They 'interpret', thus stealing the meat from between the jaws of talent. Those who actually CAN write and turn to anything as venomous as criticism are leeches--a plague of blood-sucking parasites, non-living and non-productive, who exist by absorbing the living material upon which they obscenely feed. This lack of divine substance is reflected in their lives with are, without exception, sterile and decadent. Trapped in a void of creative spirit, they hack up the works of genuine artists, whom they hate and fear, worship and despise. They try to cut us down to their own pitiful size so they can eat us."

I paused for breath, "I hope that makes my position clear." Cullen sat motionless, fixing me with his steely eye.

I coughed. "Other positions are available, of course." I was searching my memory for any notice that Cullen had ever gained from the activity I had just denounced. He continued his baleful gaze.

Then, "Right," he clipped out, "A great many of our colleagues would endorse, even expand on, those sentiments. Some might deal in some way with critics whose reviews are favorable, but I think most would respond as you have, many with comparable bombast and fervor. Now think, my boyo."

Being told to think by Cullen generally meant being ordered to absorb his own twist of logic, so I steeled myself to resist.

"Have you ever given any thought to this theory of criticism, itself placed before by a critic?" He was standing now, pacing in front of me, his tattered cloak swirling around him like leaves in a storm. "The idea that critics are actually the culmination of the creative act, the method by which or various efforts are measured, the priests that justify our ways to the voracious public, without which they would never comprehend the workings of gifted old heads such as our own? Gad, stop gagging, man! Short, stout, complacent men are rendered hideous by such displays."

"Cullen!" I frothed, "Critics are perverts, thieves, assassins and rapists! They seize the living flesh of our creations, set them upon the sterile soil of their own arid imaginations, and starve them out of existence. If I were God almighty and had just created the firmament and land, had made seas to roll by cliffs of darkness, a critic would not approve, but use this to make insights into my character. They would find that a sea is not a sea at all, just so poorly done it looks like a sea instead of something much better they would have done if they'd felt it worth the bother. They thwart us like the villains who once reared freak babies in bottles for the sideshow."

"But what about the adventure, man?" Cullen swooped over and grabbed my shoulder, "What about the suspense? Don't you enjoy the thrill of waiting until after publication to find out what you really said and thought and did?"

"Cullen, I know what I said beforehand, or at least what my agent and publisher decided I'd said."

Cullen seated himself again, staring around himself like Lear, "We have an impasse here," he growled darkly, "The critics insist they are vital, the artists are equally adamant that they are defilers. It seems that there is no hope for reconciliation--too much animosity and intransigence. But we must eliminate this schism."

From the word "schism" my mind flew to "schizoid" then to "schizophrenia", then to the recollection that Cullen's past included dallyings in psychology--either as an inmate or an analyst or something of that general stripe. Thus I assumed that there lingered in the back of his jackanapes mind some sort of therapeutic approach to this problem. How wrong I was. Blithely assuming that I would be delivered a sermon on arcane mental theories, I laid my head on the block. "What would you propose towards that end, good Cullen?"

"Well," the axe whistled down, "I should think that the answer is to kill them all."

When I had regained some sort of composure he continued, oblivious to the half-hour of logic I had babbled at him. "There is no hope for reforming them, correct?" That part, at least sounded reasonable.

"We can't very well amend the artists, now can we?" That, too, seemed as close to lucidity the man ever cared to tread.

"And the critics would sooner die than relinquish their avocations--the more so since they are also their vocations. The sensible thing to do is to put the whole lot out of our misery."

Such would Cullen use the word "sensible". Somehow, as always, I gave him my halfhearted assent. As always, I would play along with him. And he would play me along. Curiosity has killed wiser cats than I and, I must admit, a quick scan over a stack of reviews on my desk did much to persuade me to at least "look into" Cullen's plan. In fact, in turned out that said plan was already well underway. I had known for some time of the huge convention that would bring together in one room in Manhattan virtually every major drama and literary critic unworthy of the name. Cullen's scheme had been hatched upon learning of it and his preparations, as I was soon to find, were already well under way and characteristically immaculate.

We motored (the way one moves in a Jaguar Saloon like Cullen's) out to a remote camp in the woods to join a group of equally miffed writers, the cadre of Cullen's crusade to rid our lives of criticism. Squads had been designated, helicopters hired, blueprints analyzed, tasks deployed, communications established. We comrades-in-arms were outfitted with Cullen's Hollywood tastes in weaponry--Israeli submachine guns, Swedish assault rifles, black-bladed knives, nattily tailored camouflage jump suits. I had never before taken that term so literally as to imagine actually jumping--much less out of aircraft--but soon learned better than to put it past myself or the infectious mood at Camp Cullen. Not that it was easy to infect a middle-aged dumpling like myself. I felt like a guerrilla in the mist and told Cullen as much.

"Terror incognita, eh?" he breezily replied. "Nothing to it. We merely tap the innate human instincts for aggression and regression. And what is art, after all, but a fusion of the two?"

So I remained to be swept up in the ambience of arms and man. I found myself synchronizing watches, Karate-chopping defenseless boards, firing silenced machine pistols, and applying burnt cork facials with the rest of the civilized malcontents. A few purists questioned the need for the cork and jungle camouflage when assaulting a target in Manhattan, but such was our mood by then that we shouted them down, tearing off our headbands to cheer when Cullen insisted. "It's true our mission is urban," he told us, looking very urbane himself in spiffy cammies and cocked beret, "But there is no substitute for proper costume. Production values are vital to the élan of any production."

We were with him to a man, sweeping through weeks of marksmanship, pushups, obstacle courses, and underwater demolition. Cullen was everywhere, beaming inspiration among us and polishing the slightest detail. Struggling at strangling a dummy with a length of piano wire, I felt a tap on my shoulder. "I find the E below middle C the most satisfactory," Cullen chirped, "Though some prefer a higher, suppler string, there is the risk of it breaking in the field. I think mind the wisest choice." Thus Cullen and his wisdom.

But admittedly, we progressed under it. Soon we were sailing through the strenuous militarism with the sweaty, causal snap of a Broadway rehearsal. The show was coming together as we learned our moves, our lines, and our motivations. From a collection of motley emotion-mongers, we were emerging a hard corps of killers. Everywhere was displayed the determined development of clench-toothed snarls, sudden jubilation in spewing out great hails of bullets, revelations of hidden talents for athletic mayhem. Cullen glowed. We perspired.

I actually became so caught up in our road company blitzkrieg that I hardly noticed the calendar's steady progress towards what Cullen termed "D-Day", which we cheerfully interpreted as signifying D-ranged. But with only two more days to go, (more punctiliously, at what he termed "H-Hour minus 48") Cullen ceased the training and declared us a fit and fatale as we would ever be. Certainly as we would ever be again. From that point on, we concentrated entirely on the details of our actual penetration into, revision of, and withdrawal from the convocation of contumely.

The plan itself, amazingly enough, was quite workmanlike and simple--though inevitably complicated by the doubtfully necessary quiddities of rendezvous, radio contacts, rappelling teams and synchronized movements that Cullen so enjoys. We would embark in helicopters from an airport in suburban New Jersey of all places, land on the convention center roof, slip through the building's negligible security, enter the balconies above the awards ceremony, mow the malefactors down in windrows, then swiftly leave through the kitchen halls and elevator. Clean, surgical, and effective.

Still, I'd known others of Cullen's plans and by the time we'd finally assembled on the D-signated day, I was feeling apprehensive. Being surrounded by uniformly dressed fellow authors--and Cullen, naturally, togged up to the M Minute--calmed me somewhat, but as we boarded the helicopter (and more so as it lifted off the ground) I found my anxiety heightening correspondingly. By the time we were chopping over the City skyline like a tropical disturbance my heart was tripping a fandango and my face bulging red. My comrades-in-arms rather enjoyed this effect, expressing trust that it was victory I was flushed with and terming my colorful condition "Apoplexy Now".

I was far from soothed when Cullen stood up by the gaping door and, struck a caesarian pose, and broke a grim grin to announce, "Break a leg." Martial to a man, the vengeful chorus responded with a shout of, "If not a neck!" Then the helicopter touched down and we were out and about it.

Once off the roof, everything fell into the surreal but oddly comforting rhythms of a dream one has had before. We proceeded down stairwells and through tunnels, all with the odd hup-hup place-switching associated with SWAT teams on television. There was no untoward incident, no shock of discovery: we all reached our posts in good order, confirmed by our synchronized chronometers.

At that point it was obvious just how ubiquitous were Cullen's leadership and attention to detail. It had fallen on me to enter through the kitchen, thus eliminating that egress and incidentally insuring that none of the help made an uncued entrance during our final act. I had barely tasted a slab of pate with caper sauce, filched of a plate intended for the unappreciative maw of a critic, when Cullen popped up in front of me like a camouflaged Punch to flick a drop of sauce off my tunic and tap my stomach with an admonitory finger.

"The _coup de foie gras_ , eh?" he admonished, "Armies may travel on their stomachs--but, like wines, some stomachs travel better than others."

He strode towards the ballroom doors, but spun in a commanding commando pose to say, "At any rate, from what I hear of the chefs in this house, you'd be better to avoid mixtures or sauces and stay with fresh, simple ingredients."

The chefs glared daggers, if not cleavers, at his back. I shrugged to show that I didn't necessarily share the opinions of the top command (also that I was holding a machine gun). Then he was off to see his wizardry, leaving me to herd the scullery help into the walk-in cooler and guard the door against those attempting early exits.

Part of the genius of Cullen's scenario was an emphasis on mowing the critics down in the doorways and it was extremely gratifying to think of them bolting for the exits as hastily as they ever claimed to at a premiere, only to find the portals choked with the bodies of their fellow vermin, forcing them to clamber over the mounting piles of carrion or turn back into a withering rain of lead. I would have liked to watch it all from the gallery, perhaps with a few cries of "Bravo!" and "Author!" but my post in the kitchen prevented my witnessing a scene I have since heard recounted with relish by several masters of anecdote. We also serve who only stand with the waiters.

As it turned out, a surprising number ignored the marked exits (let alone the "Employees Only" signs) and tried to escape in my direction. My first kill might have given me qualms, had it not happened to be a particularly porcine columnist for the literary supplement whose mastication of my latest opus I could quote you verbatim had I the stomach for it. I can only pray that the swine regretted his choice of both words and orientation as I gunned him down in his Guccis; I remain unrepentant. I found myself explaining, as I cross-hatched black and white tuxedos with almost Japanese patterns of tiny red explosions, that one has to do what one has to do. And therefore to come on, and make one's day.

It was all over very fast (the salient purpose, I suppose, of rapid fire weaponry). I had no sooner dispatched my final foe to that ultimate critique that awaits us all (and nicked some cunningly frosted truffles from an abandoned dessert cart) than I heard Cullen's code knock at the locked fire door and opened to admit him and the cheery sight of a convention hall reduced to a charnel house.

"Ah," he beamed, "The roar of the grease gun, the smell of the crowd."

The rest of the players were exuenting through the door, flushed with accomplishment and bonhomie. As we trooped through the kitchen and out the service hall, I lagged behind a second to let the cooks and waiter off ice and nab a slab of baked Alaska I couldn't help but notice earlier.

As we stepped into the alley outside, the excruciatingly synchronized bus, its signs suggesting that it carried extras for "Miss Saigon", pulled up and we filed aboard and were gone. Not without much cheering, slapping of backs, and singing of good fellows and happy days redux. It was all over, including the shooting, and the bus was stocked with a more than adequate buffet and far, far more than the traditional ninety nine bottles of beer. Our acclaim for Cullen knew little restraint; our thirsts and appetites none at all. How many armed uprisings have rid themselves of oppression in a single action?

But, despite Cullen's magnificent conception--the entire idea spangled with breathtaking originality and sewn with surprise, the execution precise and painstaking, the _esprit de corpse_ of our associates crisp and uncompromised--one of those infuriating opening-night flaws cropped up. An UZI projectile ("slug" in the parlance of the work itself) had only grazed the head of a mealy-mouthed sycophant from the "Times", though it produced a great deal of blood and an extremely deathlike appearance. He evidently (as reconstructed from his later report) fell into a mass of palm foliage and thus eluded the attention of those delivering the _coup de grace_. He was found alive and revived.

Thus it was, as though some stern Hellenic fate had conspired against us, that I was confronted, while sprawled fashionably in Cullen's capacious study for a shrimp and cheese brunch with champagne and "the papers", with a review of ruthlessly abusive style that exposed the particulars of our raid and analyzed its failure. Never mind that we had done for all but one of our tormentors, the verdict was icy and all-encompassing. The accidental sparing of one reviewer's life was seized upon as a symbolic portrayal of the poverty of the general experience, taste, virtuosity and even conviction on the part of the anonymous authors of the whole fiasco. "After all," the review augered on, "Freud has made clear the nature of what we call accidents."

As I read I was inundated by the brute, obvious truth that had eluded me in the sweep of Cullen's enthusiasm and mania; a classic example of conservation of dementia. We had changed nothing and never could. Nature abhors even so felicitous a vacuum as a dearth of pundits and pedants. Of course there would already be a rush to promote to full tenure the critical faculties of copy boys, coffee girls, janitors, and toilet-sweepers. Already the scum would be rising in whatever reservoir of rabble the journalists dredge to recruit their numbers. Hadn't much of the problem been that critics need no other qualifications than their own opinions, the cheapest coin available in the intellectual market?

I instantly saw that there would be more criticism and "dialogue" over our attack, discussions increasingly knowing because the writers were not contaminated by any first hand experience. Our techniques would be dissected by experts who had no more seen a firearm than film reviewers have ever seen a camera or boom mike. There would be some rebutting and head butting as the new-fledged parasites jockeyed for position in the derogatory derby, but very little controversy--one can hardly expect murdering critics as an artistic statement to draw many rave reviews. Eventually they would settle back into their ruts, pouring scorn on more conventional works. Even my flickering hope that our raid might serve as a deterrent to the new degeneration of vipers flickered out as I asked myself why anyone would fear for a life devoted to savaging and scavenging the dreams and pleasures of others. With a shudder of dread, I passed the review over to Cullen, who had been pursing his lips over some obscure ranting in the financial section.

His eyes burned with the cold blue flame of hell as he read, his cheeks flushing, his knuckles white. Finally he laid the paper aside, first carefully folding it, and rose. I quaked to think of what he might engender. "I suppose I have no choice in what I must do now," he said through rigid jaws.

"And pray, what would that be, gentle Cullen?" I asked, surrendering myself to some ghastly denouement.

"A bit obvious, isn't it?" Cullen intoned,. "I'm canceling my subscription immediately and writing the editor what I suspect will be a fairly percussive open letter."

The little launch cut effortlessly through the low, slow swell of the open Caribbean, rolling over the sun-sparkle in the general direction of Key West, but with the Cuban mainland still visible behind it. Jim and Doc stood on top of the wheelhouse with binoculars, Doc scanning the horizon abaft, Jim focusing on the foredeck below, where Sancha lolled nearly naked, catching a few rays.

Doc pulled Jim's attention away from her lush flesh. "Damn. Here they come."

"Took 'em long enough to figure it out and get after us."

"Well, it won't take them long to catch us. They're big, heavily armed, and twice our speed. Have to be making thirty knots."

Jim serenely scanned the big gray naval vessel in pursuit of them. "Rockin' good news. We snatch their boat and get home in half the time."

Doc leaned over to speak in the wheelhouse window. "Hey Herman, lash the wheel on this course and come up. We have to decide what to do. Bring the guns."

"Sounds like you already decided," Jim wryly observed.

"What, you want to take a vote?"

Jim called out loudly to Sancha, "Yo, Chiquita! You vote for dying, or going back to Cuba in chains?"

Sancha came off the deck smoothly and stared back at the pursuing ship. She walked back towards the wheelhouse, watching it draw closer, bristling with armed marines.

"Shit," she spat, "It's the Camaquey. The piggiest crew afloat, all just dying to fuck us up."

"This gal knows her sailors," Jim beamed proudly. "So how you vote, toots?"

Sancha brandished the sentry's carbine overhead, shaking it. "The full metal ticket."

Moss emerged from the hatch, lugging an armful of guns. "You _votin'_ this shit? We ain't got a chance."

"Or even a quorum," Doc noted for the record.

"Lemme tell you how I size it up, " Jimmy told them. He selected a Brazilian H&K from Moss, checked the magazine, and slammed it back home. "I say, Lock and load..." He howled like Rick Derringer,

"Lock and load, hootchie koo

Lawd yo' mama bites my fuse."

His vocal endeavors were cut off by a hail of small arms fire from the deck of the Camaguey. He dove behind the wheelhouse, along with the rest, as the Cuban marines raked them with automatic fire. The deck gun lobbed a shell near enough to splatter the decks and ring the hull like a bell, then two more, equally close.

Jimmy popped up, the rifle at his shoulder, happily singing as he worked at peppering the cruiser's deck. His baritone didn't quite resemble the Rivingtons, but he had the melody down pat,

"Pa pa pa, oom, mow mow,

Pa pa pa, oom, mow mow.

Pa pa pa, oom, mow mow,

Pa pa pa, oom, mow mow."

Doc had joined him in pouring lead at the larger vessel, but was already thinking about the fact that they had very little spare ammo. He squatted in the shelter of the wheelhouse to reload as Jimmy also popped down, pulling out another magazine. He howled, just like the record.

"Pa pa, pa pa, OOOOOOOO!"

Then he popped back up to continue mow-mowing the Cuban vessel.

The fight continued fierce, with occasional outbreaks of musical comedy. The boys were taking a toll, even Sancha scoring a few hits, but the firepower advantage was far too great and the situation had Last Stand written all over it.

There were fires breaking out on the deck by then, and smoke ghosting out of the portholes below. The fusillade had eliminated most of the cover on board, pushing everybody into a forlorn huddle behind the wheelhouse, which was also being slowly chewed away by the withering marine fire. Battle-worn but determined, the four fought on.

Suddenly Sancha jumped up and shook her fist, defiantly howling, " _Cuba libre_!"

Not to be outdone, Jimmy reared back and hollered like a hog caller, "Rock and Roll will never die!"

Even the dour Moss was swept up by the mood, yelling, "We shall overcome!"

Doc checked his shotgun and stuck it in his belt, then picked up the last loaded assault rifle. He noticed the other three looking at him expectantly and sighed. Wearily, he raised his fist. "Bird lives!"

Jimmy and Moss regarded him sourly, Jimmy snorting, "Damn jazz hags. Some words to live by, Doc."

"Oh, you think we're going to live?"

Jimmy dropped down on his heels and looked him straight in the face. "I have such hopes, Hoss." He swept a dramatic arm to the North and triumphantly announced, "Since, we got the U.S. Calvary to the rescue."

Doc swung his head around to see the welcome sight of a U.S. Coast Guard cutter bearing towards them. The Camaquey was already bearing off and accelerating. Doc glanced at Jim, who winked, then did a Coasters number.

"Aaa, aaa...

And then along came Jones.

Sweet shuckin', slow fuckin' Jones."

Doc sagged back against the bulkhead, his rifle falling into his lap as he grinned. "Never thought I'd be glad to see the Coast Guard catch me."

Sancha was taking a professional interest in the approaching cutter. "Those _yanqui_ sailors sure dress nice."

"Better than a floating Shriner's convention, huh, Babycakes?" Jimmy asked her rhetorically, then spoke aside to Doc. "Wish she'd get her mind off work and just enjoy the cruise."

The crew of the cutter, however, appeared anything but friendly. They'd approached cautiously, covering the smaller vessel with everything from heavy machine guns to M-16's. Their cool gray hull loomed over the sinking launch, rocket launchers aimed, armed sailors at the ready.

On the bridge, three stories above the fugitives on the launch, a much-decorated captain and several other officers, all wearing holstered pistols, leaned over to examine this oddball catch. A junior officer stepped out with a bullhorn and tapped it, blasting an electronic bark. Highly amplified and military, he commanded, "Put down your weapons. Keep your hands in sight. Prepare to be boarded. We will fire at any sign of resistance."

The four had already laid down their arms and kept their hands readily visible. Jim Dandy spoke up, his voice carrying easily up to the officious officer. "Hey, Slick. Can't you see by our outfits we aren't Cuban navy?"

"Or at least by our haircuts and personal grooming," Doc added.

The junior officer glanced at the captain and replied at full bull volume, "Negative. You are suspected drug traffickers. Stand by to be boarded and show manifest."

"Now you're talking, Nephew," Jimmy bellowed. "Any dope you find we'll go halves."

"As you were!" The J.G. was not liking this backchat in front of his captain. "Identify yourselves."

Doc spoke up, deciding he'd better do the talking. "My name's Hardesty, this is Jimmy Dan Earl. We escaped from a Cuban prison and are trying to get home. That's Herman Moss. He's a CIA agent, but that's supposed to be sort of a secret."

The J.G. Pondered a second and came up short on amplified responses. He turned to his superiors and said, "Orders, Sir?"

The grizzled captain leaned over the rail and squinted at the boatload of survivors. He started to speak, then held out his hand, which was quickly filled with the younger officer's bullhorn. In a rich southern accent he barked, "Did you say Jimmy Dan Earl?"

"No," Jimmy told him, "He did. You can just call me Jim Dandy."

"Did you ever play football for Louisiana State University?"

"I had that privilege for four fine years. You aren't here to collect for that fucking alumni fund, are you?"

"I might forget a name or face," the captain boomed, "But not three touchdowns in the Peach Bowl. Especially against that coonass Arkansas."

"If I coulda done her on them Nebraska Cornholers, we'da got Cotton Bowl."

"You did your share, son. Come aboard and tell your sorry story."

Moss gave Jimmy a sidelong look. "You were a Tiger?"

"Still am, old son. Tiger a go-go, and tigerish on America. Been known to breed in captivity. 'Scuse me now, I gotta go dish grits with some scum alum."

Two sailors threw a hawser down from the main deck and Jimmy made it fast to a deck cleat on the foundering launch, then grabbed it and went up hand over hand.

"He's very big with the old boy network," Doc told Moss, deadpan.

"Shit, I guess. They'll probably give him the damn ship and he'll scam us into painting it for him."

Doc eyed the looming cutter. "Might look pretty cool in metalflake with a racing stripe."

"French cops? Make my day." Rolandi sneered. "In Germany you should worry, and maybe wear a crotch cup, you know? Hell, the Seattle cops were tougher than these truffle-toasters."

"They're cops, okay?" Fondane snapped. "They have guns and radios and cells. I was at The Battle in '99, by the way. And I didn't see you."

And she had been. To say the least. A seventeen year-old front-liner screeching her principles and stalking violent confrontations on the Seattle streets with all the energy and monomania of the narrowly-educated young. And while the televised epic of unfocused rebellion clashing with ambivalent resistance hadn't changed the World Trade Organization in the slightest (any more than offing the World Trade Center impacted World Trade) it had certainly moved Fondane's world onto another track. For one thing, she met a guy. Fairly completely.

She was already considering leaving the rural Oregon fem-nazi commune where her mother had dumped her five years before—and where she had received her impressive training in riot tactics and combative assertiveness. For one thing, she'd figured out that just no matter how correct it was, and how obligatory it seemed for a dyed-in-the-pit-hair feminist who'd actually been named after Jane Fonda and Clemence Dane, she just wasn't cut out for lesbianism. Pussies just didn't do anything for her. Not other peoples', anyway.

Besides, she was beginning to question the whole paradigm ranted forth by her sainted Mom's aging dyke comrades. The government, she was starting to believe, was nowhere near as dangerous as the wildcat wiles of the private sector, especially evil NGO's. She was also smart enough to start deconstructing some subtle flaws in a dialectic that was equally adoring of anarchism and Maoism. That and she was starting to think a lot about what it would be like to hang out with men a little. Just out of curiosity, if nothing else.

Almost inevitably, she bonded with a handsome young companion-in-arms and ended up heading east with him once the tear gas had cleared and the SPD took over the role of badguy/idiot in the whole debacle. Starry-eyed, supercharged and thrilled at the unsuspected delights of alien organs, she bopped from hotel to campground to rest area on their way to the Washington protests against the IMF, World Bank, and anybody who had money and power, then on to tackle animal geneticists in Minneapolis. She arrived at both protests with her brains fucked out and her idealism buffed to a mirror sheen.

She left Minneapolis less idealistic when it turned out her first male (or even particularly willing) sexual liaison had been with a deep-cover _agent provocateur_. Which explained the mysterious funds that had supported the young guerillas on their cross country treks from one chanting non-sequitur to another. She referred to him as "my date to the Spring Riots" on the rare occasions she spoke of him to the cadre of international trouble-makers she had joined and had now led to Geneva, and thence to the doorstep of the Large Hadron Collider.

And Rolandi, who was used to his chiseled cheekbones, gaunt Ché-like frame, and carefully cultivated wildass hair and stubble granting him entry to radical women, was very keen on making Fondane happy. He had leaped to the assumption that her architectural breasts, cello physique, and fawn eyes meant that she was essentially a wonderful person. Despite Fondane's quite earnest attempts to reveal to him that she was actually a ball-breaking, bitchy control addict. So he foolishly persevered. You don't last long in the global protest hierarchy without a streak of masochistic compulsion to lance windmills.

"The _flics_ aren't concerned with CERN," she told him scornfully. "They only care about keeping things peaceful. It's the _Conseil_ that's dangerous. They're a tool for profit-making sponsors and that's who we have to worry about."

These twerps were making her want to belt down about three stiff drinks. But her Pernod was gone and she scanned the clutter of sidewalk tables without any sign of a waiter. They were nominally in Switzerland, but it might as well have been France.

"What, they might buy us up in a hostile take-over and break us up for sale?" Chiara, whose idea of opposing globalization was currently limited to keeping Rolandi's wandering loins under Italian jurisdiction, gave Fondane the contemporary version of the old evil eye. "Sticks and guns can break our buns, Barbi-rella."

Fondane was as blasé about physical harm as any bloodied ten year veteran. "Those pigs aren't about to blow up the world. And they're not smart enough to keep us out of there." She shot Chiara a condescending smirk. "Not me, anyway."

"I'm glad you think that way," Chiara said in a silky, faux- _dolce_ tone while practically dragging Rolandi off his wrought iron chair and away from the conspirators by his ears. "I attend the results of your bravura."

Fondane stood up with a scowl on the face whose all-American prettiness was a constant source of embarrassment to her and her fists placed on the said celloesque hips. Kids, she fumed, all they want is noise and bodies slamming into each other. She spun on her heel, turning her concave back to the dilettante contingent, but her first stride projected her almost into a collision with a tall, dark stranger.

"I agree with you," he said, demonstrating a much better concept of how to ingratiate women than Rolandi had managed. "We can do it. And the police are irrelevant."

He looked like a Lebanese or Palestinian and had a strong French accent, but he was speaking Fondane's language. Not doing so bad on the non-verbal level, either. During her legendary romp up the ranks of worldwide gadflying, she'd forged a bit of a sexual legend. She'd slowed down in her late twenties, taken an attitude more gourmet than gourmand. And, other than a closet weakness for huge Scandahoovian jocks who'd never even heard of skin pigmentation, she tended to prefer men the way she preferred coffee: dark blended, spiked, and just starting to cool off. She sized up Badi Desmarais for a long beat then said, "We should talk. Let's go get some coffee."

"I agree again," he smiled. And it was some smile, actually. She liked his lean streetfighter pose, his _bleu du travail_ shirt and pants, his tight cap of curls and aquiline nose. And his smile that just invited trust. He immediately lied to her. "My name is Hakim, what's yours?"

She gave him a pretty tasty smile in return, said, "Barbra Fuckin' Ella."

\----------------

"So it's already happening?" Rolandi's intimidating pose slipped a little and he glanced at Fondane for moral support.

"It's already _happened_. I keep telling you that." The engineer was not resisting in any way Fondane could see; he leaned his bloody head against the metal wall and made no move to test the tape on his wrists and calves or shift to a less painful position.

"And I keep hitting you in the face for telling me that." The big Arab wasn't posing: his intimidation was bluntly valid, his dark face suffused with grim Islamic expectation. He squatted on his heels and reached out to flick his pistol, splashing another spritz of blood across the scattered papers and clipboards on the floor.

"Hang on, Hakim." Fondane squatted beside him and studied the scientist's bruised face. Across the room, duct-taped into a swivel chair with his forearm shattered and left eye swollen shut, Barker was again struck by the unstated quality of the blonde's leadership. The Arab and Signore Musclebound had exploded into the room yelling commands and pistol-whipping everybody in sight, and that little Italian cupcake had a lot to say, but he'd realized that this Fondane chick was both brains and balls behind this pitiful terrorist team. But how pitiful were they, really? The whole CERN installation was one of the high-security sites of the world. And barging into the "Hardon Collider" itself? Impossible. But here they were, clogging up the cramped, spaceship-like control room.

They'd smashed out dials and panels, bashed up a pretty hard guy like himself without much trouble, had to have killed some guys out in the halls. Must have come in underground, through old caves or something. He heard the hottie-in-charge tell the Arab to hold up and started laughing into the nice clean bandages they'd gagged him with.

Fondane looked up at Chiara and jerked her head, but Ms. EuroBrat just glared. The jittery rush from making it inside the collider had curdled in on her, turning her into a twitching sack of sulk. Rolandi moved over to the security guard's chair and roughly pulled off the gag. Like they needed it here, a hundred meters underground and shielded by all this mad scientist gear.

Barker licked his lips and laughed again, shaking his head. Rolandi swung a backhand at his mouth, but for all his bulging pecs wasn't all that combat-ready: Barker caught the edge of his hand in his teeth and ground down hard. Rolandi yelped like a girl and swung his big pistol up to the guard's eye.

Fondane snapped out, "Knock it off!" She stood smoothly, Barker admiring the flex of thigh, and strode over to him like a recently-released panther. Leaning down to his eye level she spoke in a silky imitation of concern, "Like to share the joke with us?"

Behind her Rolandi stared at her hips in their tight sheath of denim. Chiara caught him at it and pinched him, artlessly showing her submachine gun when he jumped and looked at her. Her case-hardened rioter/saboteur shell cracked whenever she, and especially Rolandi, was around Fondane. She should have been the centerpiece; young, rich Milano beauty with a valentine-shaped ass. But Rolandi kept acting captivated by this aging BarbieDoll with her dilettante SeattleBattle background and armed robbery record.

"So, 'Hakim', huh?" Barker chuckled. "You have no idea who that is, do you?"

"Sure do," Fondane nodded. "That's my babyboy lollipop, there. Not to mention scourge of crypto-corporate evildoers like your employers."

Barker granted her a smile for style points, said, "That's Badi Desmarais, Hotlips. He tried to break in here last year and got captured. Escaped from chains in the van to Geneva by killing two guards. Nobody's pussycat. He's not some ecofreako or whatever you maniacs are: he's Al Queda, stone-cold Jihad psycho."

Fondane slowly stood up and turned to face "Hakim", who was leaning nonchalantly on the head of the bleeding engineer. "Is that true, Hakim? You lied to me, made us think you wanted to save the planet from a black hole just to use us in some crazy, destructive religious plot?"

Badi shrugged eloquently. "I was going to mention it later. If the world didn't blow up."

Fondane crossed the small control room in two strides and grabbed Badi by the throat. He lifted the Czech pistol in his hand and socketed it into her ear. But didn't resist as she pulled his head down to hers and locked him into a long, searing kiss. Rolandi stared, practically salivating. Chiara glared in disgust. Barker would have applauded if his hands weren't taped so tight they were turning blue.

They broke the lip-lock and Fondane purred, "I am so going to punish you when I get you home." Then she turned back to Barker, kicking the engineer lightly on his knees to keep his attention. "Saving the world from being destroyed is kind of a multi-lateral concern", she said crisply. "We're equal opportunity terrorists."

At her feet, the engineer--Soulais or something--spat a gout of blood on his previously white smock and noisily cleared his throat. He glanced up at her through shattered spectacles and said, "You're too late."

The long silence after that pronouncement was not so much pregnant as blackjacked. Finally Fondane sunk down onto her heels, pulled out a blue bandana to wipes his battered face a little, and very softly said, "Could you put that in layman's terms for us?"

"You alarmist morons were right," the engineer said wearily. "We brilliant scientists were wrong."

"I should enjoy hearing that," Fondane told him earnestly. "But somehow..."

"You ever hear that album," he asked her, as though trying to change to a more pleasant topic they could all enjoy, " _Le côté noir_... Pardon me, The Dark Side of the Moon?"

"Well, yes," Fondane replied pleasantly. "Though I was more into reggae and blues."

"There is no dark side of the moon, really," he quoted heavily. "Matter of fact it's all dark."

"He is raving," Chiara snapped. "Let me make him talk to us."

"He's doing fine," Fondane told her without turning her eyes from the engineer's face. "Dark matter, right?"

"The matter that matters," the engineer said with a bubbling red laugh. "The universe is _filme noir._ I have recently been emphatically informed of that."

"You mean you figured out that tampering with the nature of subatomic reality for corporate greed might have some nasty side effects?" Chiara exploded. She had been jittery for hours and had obviously hit her limit. She advanced on the engineer waving her machine pistol wildly, her free hand clenched into a carmine-tipped rake. "You play with the basics of our lives and are so sure that your little strangelets and quirks and black-holes can't really get out of control?"

Fondane, trained in espionage and civil disruption since her childhood on the Lesbian ranch in Oregon with her mom's cronies from the Weather Underground, took wry note of the smug "globaphobe" girl's lack of hang time, but said nothing.

Rolandi, however, was eager to make points and chipped in, "You great minds who didn't realize you would be short of a digit on your computers in forty years? A black hole? Is that your idea of _noir_?"

"I am so sorry." The uninflected simplicity of his words and tone stopped Chiara's rage cold. "We concerned ourselves with calculable risks," he went on in a colorless voice. "I suppose we were blinded by our lust to know. Naked protons? Reality reduced to square one? Witness to the moment after creation? We craved it, needed it."

"Are you talking about that boson thing?"

Boson? Parker found himself wondering if there really was a Swiss navy. But the Doc had it covered. "Higg's boson," he said in his lackluster tone. "What the press calls the 'God particle'."

Badi's face darkened further and he leaned forward in emphasis. "There is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet."

Barker laughed again. "Then I guess you got nothing to worry about."

Badi's glance sobered up even a veteran of violence like Barker. That Arab kid would sit there like an autistic child, then suddenly turn into Vengeance of Islam. Break a guy's arm like a stick, matter of fact. But all he said was, "Don't we?"

"I think maybe we do," Fondane said, but Soulais was shaking his head like a guy in a trance.

"It is pointless to worry," he said and Barker felt a distinct chill at the nape of his neck.

Fondane turned the spilled trashcan upside down and sat on it, facing the engineer, broadcasting patience and attention. "Tell me."

"The idea of 'anti-matter' is very imprecise," he told her earnestly. "The concept of 'dark matter' is more exact. But in some ways there is the same effect. You could picture microscopic black holes opening throughout space, or you could picture individual atoms of opposite...orientation...canceling each other out. Or whatever scenario you read in the newspapers."

"A chain reaction, obliterating space."

"Over-dramatic, but actually understated. The alpha point is the same as the omega point, it would appear. Seeds that unfold everywhere at once, blossoming into Shiva's black flowers."

"I don't really understand the science," Fondane said. "I'm an action person. I came here because they convinced me you could obliterate the earth."

"Because you and your owners have taken the whole world into your own hands this time," Chiara pronounced, her nervous energy suddenly settled into the accusation.

"You have no right to play God," Rolandi pronounced solemnly.

"What Allah brought to bear, no other hand but His can set aside," Badi intoned.

"We're not going to let you blow up the world." Fondane said this directly to his face, her gaze unleveled and unblinking.

"Forgive me. But it's already done."

"You already blew the world up? And we didn't notice?" Chiara's usual acid sneer was back in place. Fondane merely continued looking into his eyes.

"Yes. The opposition has already occurred. But the dissolution is an ongoing process. At a subatomic level, you understand. We will not explode. This is not the Hollywood version, sorry. We will dissolve. Reality canceling itself out, one miniscule particle at a time. At an accelerating rate, of course. The usual habit of the universe. We will just merge back into the black void."

"Not with a bang," Fondane said quietly as her team stared speechless. "But with a whimper."

"As you say," Soulais nodded sadly. "C _ome feuilles mortes_."

"Baudelaire?"

Soulais shook his head reprovingly, "Jacques Prévert."

"Sorry, we're Hollywood fans."

"Myself as well. Would it be in bad taste to mention The Terminator?"

"Cute. Look, this whole area is going to be blown up in a few minutes. We'll take you out with us if you promise not to make trouble."

Barker guffawed. "You're worried about _us_ making trouble?"

Chiara turned to him with the hollow eyes of a person in deep shock. Christ, Barker thought, poster girl for nihilism. He smiled weakly at Fondane, "I assume I'm also invited?"

"It doesn't matter," the engineer said from the floor. He broke off and looked down at his blood and bonds. "Please, Mademoiselle. What have we left but our few shreds of dignity?"

Fondane glanced at Badi, who produced a wicked-looking curved knife from nowhere and cut the restraining tapes in two sudden flicks. Then disappeared the knife, leaned down to help Soulais to his feet, and brushed him off. He swayed a little, leaned against the wall. He reached to adjust his glasses, then laughed at the futility of it. He nodded a grave thanks to Badi and looked back at Fondane. "Of no importance whether I go with you or stay here for your cinematic effects. You understand? Take me or leave me."

Fondane looked around the control room. "Anybody got any doubts at this point?"

Any that Chiara might have harbored dissolved under Soulais' indifference to death. Her taut, olive cheeks suddenly flooded and she blinked like a little girl whose pet just expired. Rolandi instinctively reached to wipe her eyes, but hesitated, then put his arm around her shoulders. She sagged into him, wide-eyed and limp. "I don't think he's lying," Badi said. "But he could be wrong."

"I guess we'll find out."

"Not really," Soulais said gently. "I am telling you, this is not some physical spectacular. The singularity level of existence is not independent of your mind, your perception. It..." he paused, searching. "If you awaken from a dream, do you see the dream destroy itself? No. It just leaves your mind. You have nothing to be afraid of."

Badi probed Fondane, as Rolandi turned the same look on Chiara: the ultimate inventory. "Do you think we can still escape?" he asked her."

There is no escape," Soulais said, his softness shaded with a little of a professor's irritation at not being understood. "The reaction is..."

"He means from here," Fondane broke in. "Getting out of these tunnels and back across into France."

"And into bed," Badi said flatly.

Fondane smiled. "An excellent course of action,"

Soulais nodded with Gallic approval. "In that way, you will not be wrong. Irregardless."

"How long?" Barker spoke from across the room. He hadn't complained about not getting cut loose. "Until it's all over?"

"Since time will also be ending, it's hard to quantify that," Soulais told him. "But I calculate that you will experience the next two months normally."

"Great," Barker muttered. "There goes my interview with Blackwater in October."

"A colleague disputes my figures," he added helpfully. "Perhaps as much as five months. Maybe even until Christmas."

"Christmas?" Fondane murmured softly. She turned to Badi, her usual direction and resolve back in place. "I know where we can go."

Two big pharmacies burglarized in one month, both of them clients of King County Armed Patrol, were bound to cause some speculation. Both had the hot alarm setup installed, both went down on graveyard when Brewster was dispatching alone, neither one of them let out a peep. Questions were asked, and the best Brewster could come up with was "equipment failure" or "faulty installation".

Not totally unlikely at KCAP, where the alarm installers are grunge punk pals of the owners' shithead son. Kids who have been known to drill holes through a wall into a hot water pipe, then drive off leaving a limitless supply of water leaking into a million dollar home. Better yet, two of the little Beavisheads got busted pulling burglaries on homes they installed (illegal entry is a breeze when you're the one who put the alarm in) then were allowed to do more installations while awaiting trial.

But still, there was the matter of recent lifestyle, which was taking a tilt towards Life of the Party. He'd always been known to keep his nose well-entertained, and some of us knew he'd lately switched over to the pipe. Seldom a sign of increasing stability. Costlier yet, he'd been seen in his favorite haunts like the Frigate and seamier joints on Lake City's fashionable "Crack Alley" in the company of two of the more desirable and imminently attainable dancers from Deja Vu, a matched set of total ruination we called Little Red Yvette and Little Blonde Yvonne. The kind of twosome you can put together with the two pharmacy takeoffs, do the required arithmetic and come up with approximately the same integer everybody else did. Things started "compressing" a little around the office and it started looking like Brewster was going to have to pull off an exceptional maneuver to chill out of this one. Which, in a way, he did.

Brewster had enjoyed a certain reputation when he was one of the uniformed patrol officers responding to the alarms. He was known as tough and cagy, probably corrupt and kinky, and as a shooter. Not all rent-a-cops are burnt cases on their way down and out hoping to turn our careers around; most are Real Cop wannabees, many are gunfighter wannabees. They work for five bucks an hour so they can pack. Hell, even Rayford was working there at the time. That dum Arkie. I remember him interrupting an Academy class in Deadly Force to ask them to cut to the chase and just tell him when it's okay to kill somebody. I think he's on a force over in Kitsap now. With those other Arkanoid sociopaths.

Having guys of this general stripe charging around with guns might seem like a kind of nervous service, but that's the deal: you pay KCAP for an alarm, bad guys trip the alarm, and we show up packing heat. As Rayford puts it, hefting his mega-gat, "It's a detergent to crime." I could charge Brady Bill pimps decent money to watch the scene at KCAP every morning at 6:02 sharp. Six or seven uniformed gunmen congregate in the office, waiting like gunmen wait, hands poised, eyes hovering for the slightest movement. As soon as James Arness goes for his gun (courtesy of cable) there's the rustle and rattle of a roomful of desperadoes slapping leather at once, going for the virtual drop on Mister Dillon. No real-time gunsmoke, though.

Except that one time when Rayford got a little too into it and actually capped off a .44 round. Fast draw but no accuracy points—he didn't even hit the old console TV. But he got the wall beside it, through and through to the toilet in the bathroom behind. Hydrostatic pressure amplifying custom-cast mass and frighteningly overloaded muzzle velocity instantly reduced the crapper to various off-white smithereens and the office to a flood plain. And Rayford didn't even get fired. In fact, he's a legend. See, people are still talking about him.

But Brewster was known as a shooter among shooters, a hitter who arrived on a scene with the _éclat_ of his idol, Ronnie Lott. Although the only opponent he'd officially notched so far was The Black Knight. Who had definitely asked for it. Brewster had been patrolling right on 145th NE (strategically near the Deja View) so it was less than two minutes from catching the squeal to skidding into the parking lot. And the first thing he noticed was an open door. A cop's worst nightmare. You walk up there with no idea if the guy has split or if God knows who is still inside; weird, wired, and Satan's favorite pull toy.

You or I would have waited for backup, but not Brewster—there was shooting to be done and he was the guy to do it. Not a mindset, however, that makes it any less terrifying to ease into a dark bar with your gun in both hands and your nuts fluttering in your throat. He was quartering the room, moving through it, herding possibilities towards the blind corner when directly behind him the Voice of The Badge of Death with Crushed Skull Cluster spake unto him thusly: "WHO DARES CHALLENGE THE BLACK KNIGHT?"

Or it would have said all of that if Brewster hadn't dropped into a roll and fired half a clip of his Glock into any part of the pinball machine that moved a muscle. When he saw the shivarees of glass and sparking relays and tumbling steel balls and punctured metal painting of the Knight himself _hors de combat_ , he was so pissed/shook/exhilarated that he gave it another Glockin' spiel just to calm down and get some perspective. So another legend was born. Nobody else had ever whacked the Black Knight. Or any other pinball machine, come to that. You just knew this was a guy who was going to make his mark.

But then he shattered his right arm in a freaky motorcycle accident. Even freakier, perhaps, for the guy who was sitting behind a desk minding his own actuarial tables in a little insurance office on Lake City Way, when the clutch springs on a demented Dodge pickup revving at the traffic light failed, causing it to leap forward and spread Brewster and the cherished 850 shaft-drive Susuki he called SuziQ over a block of pavement before plunging through the flimsy wall to present Mr. Good Hands with a new laptop desk and several broken ribs. Bad office day. Presumably fully covered.

But Brewster came out worse. Hospital time, followed by being indefinitely chained to the dispatch booth until he mended up enough to resume patrol. He sniveled about being hung up in the office all night, and we all commiserated, but actually he was getting totally infatuated with dispatch.

It's a position of unique power and perception, actually: a patrolman spots a bitchin' tough seat cover, he calls in her license number with an annotated description and a request for backup from Brewster, who taps the resources of the Sno-King computer for her name, address, criminal background, maybe even credit rating and results of last pap smear. Any crime on the police or fire bands and a Man From KCAP will be on the scene before the news cameras, relaying a full, informed report to Brewster's headset. He was years ahead of the webhead nerds—a prototype of them. But his virtual world was the Real World and he was wired in hard and interactive, his nerves stretched like batwings across the nocturnal urban aether, his senses McLuhan-filled with nuance and outburst and cracking of equidistant cybertwigs. He had the ears of a thousand alarms, the eyes of two dozen rabid rovers, the memory of two county governments, and the talons of cars full of shotguns and ill will. He was wired out of his mind, crawling those streets like a viper, blind but all-hearing, immobile but all-knowing. He wasn't just a spider in mid-web; he was the ganglion, the cyborg, the neuromancer, the night of the expanding man—had only to close his eyes to become an owl on the wing.

He quickly learned a dispatcher's ESP; sensing the timing, delays and minute distinctions between a break-in that requires immediate response and an owner fuckup or equipment failure that could cost KCAP a hundred bucks for cops responding to a false alarm. He would have two televisions on, CB and official band scanners, sports radio talk show, and in between alarm activity would be delving around the various computers and special cop bands, sniffing up a bigger picture of the jacker's world hypostatic to the events that get screened, then clumped together under "Details at Eleven". He never did go back to patrol. But he got very cozy with the cops.

We dispatched Mountlake Terrace cops after two in the morning. Including the famously cute little blonde sergeant with the business card that said, "You are talking to a Police Officer! Relax. Stay calm. Just lie down and do what the nice officer tells you." Which we all learned, one by one and occasionally in selected groups, generally meant she would slip you into something comfortable—like a pair of handcuffs lined with mink. She did some weird shit with nightsticks, too, if my memory serves. Once Brewster made her night by slapping about five pair of cuffs on her every feasible appendage until she was motionless and emotional, then sticking her own overbuilt .357 Ruger into her mouth and pulling the trigger. He described her reaction to the click of the hammer as "Magnum come loudly". She gave him a pair of the mink cuffs as a souvenir.

But the point is, he was getting very intimate to the net of happenings and familiar to the cops who would respond. And, as designated party boy for strip mine workers, confidant to purveyors and consumers of drugs... what could possibly go wrong with a set-up like that?

Whatever did, he was wearing the mink handcuffs when found, kneeling with his hands behind him, head tilted forward dripping goo on the rug. The classic "execution style" ventilation, flawlessly executed. Case still open, last I heard. Party or parties unknown.

I don't really fall by the Alibi much these days, but I just had to tell Bonner about my new scam. It's a tacky little place hidden away on Fourth, not just incidentally a short two blocks from the county slam and its surrounding colony of bail bond shops. It's a tacky place with no clientele to speak of, just people who come and go. Bondsmen and those almost-vaguely-attractive women with an air of past trouble that always seem to work for them, your seamier strata of process servers, maybe even a burnt-out ambulance-humping old lawyer or two, some guy using his release papers for ID. The only real regulars are bounty hunters and it's the only place you can have two bounty hunters in the same room without trouble.

Don't bother looking for it because it's a piece of shit anyway and they don't like tourists. There's some half-hearted Sonics and Mariners posters, but it's not what you'd call sporty unless you consider it sport to watch a backlit canoe and waterfall go around the sky-blue waters of a Hamm's sign.

Bonner hangs out here and takes his calls on the phone behind the bar, possibly the last working black Bakelite dial phone in the country. It's hard for Bonner to find a group of people he can feel morally superior to. Or that aren't afraid of him. These guys are too far out of it to give a shit about getting their ass handed to them by Bonner. So they speak their minds. Such as they are.

I'm just barely tolerated here myself and wouldn't be if somebody hadn't once recognized me from the joint. I'm a known photographer and suspected writer and these guys are working men. Not that they ever work, but they would be working men if they weren't on SSI or a run of bad luck. Not some asshole magazine guy at any rate. I bear up under the rejection. Haven't had to shoot anybody to get respect. Neither has Bonner. Bunch of guys with blood on our hands, oblivion on our minds, chips on our shoulders, and the final argument on the tip of our tongues. Real conversation pit.

I roomed with Bonner when he first came up from Florida, scrounging up skips and piecing it out bouncing at The Handlebar. Not my worst roomie ever, but not that nice a guy, down deep. Women, for their usual unfathomable reasons, were all over him. We had a third roomie and cash cow for awhile, some pony-tailed yuppie lawyer with an Electro-Glide and a Peter Fonda fixation who thought that hanging around Bonner would hotwire his sex life. Actually, it turned out the other way around. Chicks who dug Bonner weren't too interested in Dan Quayle types and in fact, about the third time his efficient, oh-so-withit fiancée came around she ended up getting the full Bonner treatment and lost interest in Peter Ponytail altogether. Though she did get shopped around a fairly interesting collection of Dixie dregs.

Bonner was generous with his women, I'll say that for him. Once he just walked into my room naked and dropped a washed-out blonde on my bed and said, " _Bon Appétit_ ," which sounds ridiculous in a canebreak/Raiford drawl. I'm too sensitive and conscious to take advantage of something like that myself, but fortunately she wasn't.

On the other hand, he could be a little petty at times. Like the time he snatched some fugitive from the law of diminishing returns out of a Nevada bar, then drove him back up here in the trunk of his car. He got so pissed-off that the guy piddled in his trunk that he head-butted him in the forehead and gave him a concussion. When I mentioned that he could have let the guy out to pee now and then, somewhere in the three-day trip, he said, "If I'da wanted him pissing, I'da watered him."

He loved my new grift, bought me a drink out of appreciation for a guy who'd found a whole new seam of income in a tight-assed world. It's not a real big deal, but it pays. The University District chamber of commerce had decided to combat graffiti by posting a thousand dollar reward for information leading. A grand for nailing taggers! I couldn't believe it.

It took me a whole two nights prowling to nab some little fuckers spraying the SeaFirst garage with the usual dyslexic doodles. The artiste, a Last Exit type with pseudo Dreadnoughts, had five holes in his ear with pre-rolled joints sticking through them like a Rasta porcupine. Booyah, twerp; can you spell "Ten bills on the hoof?" I didn't see much reason to give him any civic lectures, just walked up and punched his head into the wall. His locks padded the impact a little, but hey, for a thousand bucks I've got time to take a second shot. His pals did a great _Los Desaparecidos_ imitation.

I called the cops on my cell phone. Well, somebody's cell phone, you suppose. They roll up and here's a graffito half way done (like you can tell the difference), a kid laying there with a can of matching paint covered with his fingerprints (including the one in a dab of paint that I was thoughtful enough to add—personalized tagging, I call it), and an urban cultural hero getting my name logged on for the thousand bucks. I don't understand why nobody put a bounty on these little fuckers before. They ought to put a bill on spare-change artists while they're at it. Easiest money I ever made, and there's plenty more. It's like being the first guy to discover buffalo herds.

Bonner was toasting my ingenuity (and reminding me of the fifty I still owed him, as long as I was so flush) when Bobby Mays walked in. With another story Bonner just had to hear. Bobby's by no means an Alibi regular. More likely to be found after midnight down in the "Tweaker Lanes" if you know where I mean, and not bowling a line. Or in some kitchenette motel on Aurora North cooking speed. Slaving his fingers to the bone over a hot triple neck flask while a couple of extremely slim teenaged hose monsters stir up a batch of crank in the bathtub with a Zodiac paddle.

The kind of guy, all he needs to get respect in a cellblock or biker rally is take off his shirt and give a load of the scars etched on his chest and stomach by exploding, acid-filled glassware; occupational hazard of the serious cooker. So, not one to hang around these premises, just dropping by to tell Bonner about what happened to Jimbo— probably the worst, most corrupt bounty hunter in the state. And the grungiest, not that it matters. If you're into Armani and Dakkar, you don't work as a dogcatcher for humans.

Bobby had just walked out himself, time served. But it had been a funner than usual stay, courtesy of Jimbo. Who'd had the paper on Bobby's latest FTA and good idea where to turn him up. But Bobby hadn't been in the motel room out by Federal Way, just his cute little girlfriend and all that glassware, both of which Jimbo had his way with. Hunters deal in gray areas, so whether or not it's rape to tell an underage honey that if she spreads them hams they won't have to talk to the cops about being in a room with a meth lab is a little fuzzy in some people's mind—but not in Bobby's. And was it larceny for Jimbo to scrape all the residue out of the flasks with a credit card, slip it in the cel off his Camel pack, bag it, and pocket it? Hey, I've got my faults, but I'm no lawyer.

But Jimbo didn't have his way with Bobby, who had smelled something coming and already had his Lexus accelerating out of the parking lot when Jimbo stepped in front with his gun pointing through the windshield. Almost rid the world of him right there, but Jimbo is highly spry for a guy that size. Bobby was out on 99, picking up speed and taking the evasive by the time Jimbo got back up and into his widely despised Camaro. Clean away and not even any shots exchanged. Bobby figured it's better having the cops catch you than having Jimbo do the honors. But not to worry.

What happened, the cops nailed Jimbo giving chase and pulled him down. They didn't seem very impressed by his bail bond credentials, but were highly edified by the packet of speed scrapings in his pocket. So a few days later, when Bobby walks onto "A" deck in the old county on warrants, FTA's, and about a yard of old possession beefs; there's Jimbo already in the dayroom on the meth possession rap: so proud and bad he's still in general population with all the guys who hate his guts. Bobby takes one look and, before getting down to business, says, "Oh, man...there IS a God." But you could tell that Jimbo had a lot less conviction.

Everybody in the place had flat, blue-black skin, slitted eyes, and heads shaved bald except for elaborately lacquered topknots that added almost a foot to their height. They were also uniformly roughneck scoundrels. Even here in Minius, the most rugged ratnest of rascally rakehells they'd happened on yet, this bar stood out as degenerate and dangerous. Even the wall art advertised the general orientation of the place. Lots of bars have paintings of naked women, but usually not brandishing knives and decorated with scars. Ben and Monke held firearms cocked in their laps, ugly revolvers with huge cylinders and bamboo handles. The other partiers at their table were sleek black local drug fiends, laughing with pointed yellow teeth as they tossed off odd liquors and smoked from blue clay pipes like stubby kazoos.

Nabo stood squarely behind them, making no secret of what he held under the bright blue brocade ceremonial robe. His counterpart stood opposite, also advertising being armed, vigilant, and a hair from going off. He scowled at Nabo, a ghastly display of ridges and teeth that would have intimidated many a strong man. Nabo flashed him a friendly grin. The counterpart blinked, thought it over, then returned a merry smile, marred only slightly by his collection of welts and scars.

One of the local drug fiends, a white rosette pattern etched into his face, passed Monke a bottle of pinkish liquid with some vaguely aquatic creature moving inside it. Monke tipped it up and knocked back a swig. He handed the bottle, carefully masking his disgust in order to set Ben up. Ben took it, squinted at the struggling mollusk, and tilted it up for a deep draught. He covered up his reaction, but Monke had been watching and caught the flutter of his throat muscles. Ben kissed the glass outside the imprint of the suction pseudopod and passed the bottle on. Meanwhile their tattooed trading partner was examining the low stone bowl of golden herb. He sniffed at it, examined some on his finger. He spoke laconically to Ben in the lilting local jive.

"No way," Ben told him. "Totally organic. Look at this."

He reached into his robe, drawing a flicker of attention from Nabo's counterpart, and slowly drew out a large, golden marijuana leaf, which he passed to the fiend.

"See. It's all herbs and spices, Tats."

The leaf was sniffed, stroked, nibbled, and tugged at by the tattooed doper and his circle of attendant fiends. Ben took out another whole leaf and ground it between his palms. He dusted the crushed herb into the bowl of a huge Max Ernst hookah in the middle of the table, motioned the Tattooed Man to the ivory mouthpiece beside him, and leaned over to light the weed up.

The smoking tube passed from mouth to mouth with mellowing results and smiling nods. Nothing too crazy. Good for mellowing out or having some nice, violent sex. The lead trader looked at the leaf again, stroked it, and scrutinized the contents of the bowl. He jabbered again, cat cries in the night.

"Michoacan", Ben said, drawing a blank.

The tattoos clumped together as the local tried to place the name. He spoke again.

"Hell, no," Ben replied indignantly. "We're from the _Distrito Federal_."

Finally hearing words he understood, Nabo chimed in, "Damn straight. Red-boned _Chilangos_ , that's us."

Their man nodded judiciously, now understanding all. He held the bowl up in one hand, waved at it with the other as though trying to make it disappear in a puff of smoke, and yowled more jive at Ben.

"We've got a buttload of it," Ben said. "Actually, three buttloads."

Grinning, the local flashed a role of bright blue banknotes, raising his eyebrows to redraw the white lines of his forehead. Ben shook his head. What these worlds needed was a central bank. Their host clapped his hands twice and a very snaky dancing girl undulated over to the table and showed her wares to the boys. Not too bad, Nabo thought. Even the scars weren't bad, arranged in an interesting pattern like contour lines. Ben smiled at the dancer, but politely shook his head at TatMan. Frowning, he pulled a finely worked leather pouch from his robe and rolled it out on the table. Inside were a bundle of what looked like large porcupine quills. He mimed stabbing one of the quills into his forearm, then held it up close to Ben's face. He squeezed it lightly and a tiny drop of green fluid appeared, quivering on the needle-sharp point.

"Oh, no. Not that shit again," Nabo groaned.

"We know where we can double up on it," Monke told Ben. "Take it."

"You test the sample," Nabo snarled. "I'm not touching that psycho _cagada_."

"What a puss," Ben said, offhandedly.

"Fuck it," Nabo snapped. "If I have wetdreams I want them to be human. At least mammals."

"A bigot, too," Monke intoned sorrowfully. "Sad."

The deal had been consummated on the strength of Monke's test of the sample green injection turning him into a gibbering heap of sweats, moans and simulated coitus that amused the tavern habitués no end. Nabo and his hulking counterpart were seated at the table now, joining in the drinking and highsiding with this fascinating new group of _compadres_. Monke had just drawn a chorus of laughs and applause with a sudden spasm of dryhumping when Ben felt Nabo stiffen beside him.

He looked up and swore under his breath, but still smiled at their hosts. "Who _are_ those guys?" he asked Nabo, who made a face and stepped back to the wall where he'd leaned a three-barreled bronze blunderbuss with an ornate piezoelectric element to fire its loads of waxed chain.

"I'd say Tool-io picks up a different bunch of stooges on every world," he said. "Seems weird they all wear the same color. But tell me, do we really care?"

"I'm starting to be a little concerned," Ben said as a second wave of troopers flowed in behind Tullio's escort. Dozens of them, some carrying heavy weapons that looked like elongated tubas. His thinking was starting to accelerate, stretching out towards the quicksilver calculations he dug so much. "When I talk to this guy, hand me that shotgun," he said calmly. "You take care of Monke. Don't let him too near your sporting goods, I'd say."

Nabo looked at Monke, who spasmed with lust for invisible partners, his mouth working, his pelvis twitching. "Too bad we didn't keep that net."

Ben leaned forward, raising an eyebrow that brought his new trade partner's hieroglyphic face closer, leaning conspiratorially over the wreckage of snacks, pipes and drinks. "Have you ever been around white guys like us before?" he asked.

The tattooed villain examined him, thought for a second. "There are stories."

"Well, you know, we're just here to deal. Have a few drinks and laughs with some colleagues." The swirled face nodded expectantly. "But a lot of white guys are into like, well, they capture black guys and make them slaves. Not us. But you know, it happens a lot."

The fiend's face hardened, re-assessing Ben and his companions. Then he smiled delightedly. "That's what the stories were about. They wanted to make us work for them. Build things."

Ben hadn't expected such a cinch payoff to his gambit. He blinked at TatMan, glanced back at the cops spreading slowly along the back walls, Tullio searching the smoky room for sight of them. He couldn't resist his curiosity, though. "How'd that turn out?"

"We ate them." The limned head flopped back in raucous yowls of glee. His sidekicks also howled and yowled, the table surrounded by hundreds of gleaming, sharpened teeth. Monke yelped, too, from the depths of his sexbuzz.

"Well don't look now," Ben said, knowing they would all look now. "But there's your slaver right there. With his gang. My amigo is going to hand me that gun. Relax, it's for them, not you. Okay?"

The dealer turned and stared at the encircling line of cops. And at Tullio, who practically had Arrogant White Slaver embossed on his forehead. He scowled, then turned back to Ben. He grinned ferociously. "So you will stand with us against them?"

"Absolutely," Ben assured him. "That's why I warned you. Who are those guys in the purple uniforms?"

"Never saw them before," the tattooed doper said, pulling out two wicked looking pepperbox revolvers. He turned to his men, who were glaring at the intruders and readying some fairly scary weapons of their own. He grinned at Ben again, "And nobody's going to see them again."

Ben felt the shotgun brush his flank, grabbed it as his latest drinking buddy stood up, hammered the table for attention and squalled a word that sounded like " _Efrendu_ ". Carousers at other tables also stood, just noticing the uniforms among them or getting clear on how to treat them. The tattooed dope fiend nodded pleasantly at Ben, spun around with both hands held straight out in front of him and opened fire on the cops. Around the room there came an echoing blast as fifty black avengers followed suit. Ben jumped up, aiming the trilobed blunderbuss. Gunning with a clusterfuck of bicycle horns, he thought as he pulled the first trigger. The shot removed a section of four cops who had been unlimbering one of the tubas. Other cops were going down, some returned fire. Customers were screeching like maniacs, jumping up on chairs and tables to charge the offending cops with long, wavy knives or vicious hatchets with trailing blades like iceskates.

Ben fired another barrel into a knot of heavy weapons cops, blowing them out of the picture. From the corner of his eye he saw Nabo snatch Monke up with one hand and throw him over his shoulder. Monke copulated madly with the shoulder, his dangling hands cupping Nabo's butt cheeks as he moaned. "Let's get out of here," Nabo growled. "Somewhere I can slap this _puto's_ ass around for this."

Ben nodded, pointed to the rear door he'd already picked out. Nabo headed for it, the undulating Monke over one shoulder, the other methodically firing an eight-barreled pistol into the police line to cover his retreat. Ben was right behind him, his final barrel held ready. He didn't see Tullio... no wait, there was the flash of pale hair moving back out the front door behind a phalanx of indigo uniforms. He backed towards the door, but a white-whorled face popped up in front of him. Waving a smoking pepperbox and one of the grisly tomahawks. "Where are you going, friend?"

Ben pointed at the cops following Tullio out the front door. "Around front, cut them off," he yelled. The tattooed warrior, who had thrown off his shirt to reveal a chiseled musculature dotted with various nicks and lesions from old wounds, howled approval. "Yes! Good! Go! I'm enjoying myself here." He turned back, firing and howling.

At the termno, set in an abandoned plaza between two dry fountains filled with trash, Nabo strode right on to the grid, Monke draped on his shoulder as limp as boiled linguini. "It's all just love," he muttered into Nabo's ass. "Love is love is just love. It's all love because we all love."

Ben laughed at Nabo's expression at receiving this sentiment and stepped on the hashmarks beside him. A second later a pile of guns clattered down onto the flagstones, along with the bundle of injectable reptile sextasy. This was starting to get expensive.

"Look how much it's cost us so far," Monke bitched bitterly, slumped in a form-fitting seat in the more hospitable environment of their hideout on En-Lari, fully recovered from his alien sex jolt on Minius. "Just in abandoned product, to say nothing of lost sales opportunities."

Ben, seated at the table with a bulb of red liquor, was concerned with more than the bottom line, wracking his brains to figure out what was going wrong. And why that dickhead Tullio, of all people. "They're local cops, is the thing."

"Who speak Tubese and wear the same colors. That's spooky." Nabo was starting to see why Ben always badmouthed this Tullio guy.

"So where's he getting them?"

"Payoffs," Nabo grunted rhetorically. Any six year old back in the barrio would figure that much.

"And how does he keep finding us?"

"Well, if you're buying local cops, you're probably also buying snitches." Monke was philosophical about it. Costs of doing business. It had just been so friction-free before that Whitehead showed up with the law.

"That's got to be it," Ben agreed. "It just makes things more complicated."

"More complicated than Mexico?" Nabo scoffed.

"Not really," Ben admitted. "But back home we know the players, can buy cops ourselves."

Monke grudgingly allowed for a slice off his profits. "So we need to buy some up in these places."

"Looks that way," Ben nodded. "Build a network of loyalty."

"Loyalty's expensive," Monke said with sad resignation.

"Yeah, but it lasts better than fear, so it's cheaper in the long run."

Nabo wasn't so sure about that, but went along. "Okay, so we put local yokels on the pad, stroke them off."

"And wait to see where the White Rabbit pops up next," Ben said grimly.

"Someplace really fucked up, is my guess," Monke said. "He's had more help with him every time he's tried for us."

"I like volume work," Nabo said and Ben smiled.

"I know what we need. A week of fucking off, pure R&R."

"Well, here on En-Lari is the perfect place for that," Monke said, recovering his good spirits instantly.

"You got it. We have plenty of money here."

"And firepower," Nabo reminded them.

"So we lay low, party out," Ben said expansively. "Think it over. Nail mass pussy."

Monke appeared to study the matter at length, furrowing his forehead. He turned a questioning gaze on Nabo. "I can't find anything wrong with that idea, can you?"

Mexican corruption rests on a rich, stable base: our legal system. More than archaic and Napoleonic, it's secret. The trials and open operations we see on North American shows don't happen here. You don't see your accuser or your judge. Lawyers file papers, they are examined, a verdict is handed down some time. You couldn't deliberately design a better field in which to reap corruption. And it will not be changed because anybody who could change it has entirely too much to lose. Your system is about people and what they say. Ours is about papers. You see something on a piece of paper and it could be true or it could be false. Where do you go to find out?

"The Truth, The Whole Truth and Anything But The Truth"

By Mundo Carrasco Latin America Review, March, 1994

"I just said I wanted to _talk_ with him!" Our Brother sounded petulant, pleading with a Dean over budget cuts in the poetry faculty.

I'd been standing against the wall of his study for ten minutes while he fidgeted in his leather chair, whining at " _Capitán_ Gárfio" and his slick sidekick. Tirado had two bodyguards flanking his desk. They had dismissed me and were regarding the two cops with sullen stares I assumed were hiding stark fear. Neither had moved a muscle.

Tirado still hadn't caught on. He fussed on his desk, turned to his bodyguards for confirmation and got no notice, then stood up and looked directly at me for the first time. "I'm sorry Mundo, this has been merely a misunderstanding. And I think it's time for you officers to leave. Thank you for your assistance."

The Feds looked at each other and laughed their asses off. Tirado goggled at them. Still no clue that they came here to kill people.

Garza cut past the "what army?" bit and went straight to the _neta_ , "You expect these guys to protect you? Or even do what you say?"

Tirado blanched and swallowed. The coin had finally dropped. He sat down woodenly and gestured feebly at his bookend _guardespaldas_. They still didn't move. The Bad Cop motioned at one of them, "Put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees." Still no move.

Smooth as a seasnake, Baddie whipped out a huge, gold chased, encrusted automatic pistol and shot it right into his face, slamming him against a wall covered with leather-bound books and splattering them with blood and even worse stuff. Tirado looked like he might swoon right out; glide straight up into Labor Heaven.

Garza sneered at the corpse, "Fucking amateurs." He swaggered up to Tirado's desk and glared at him. He frowned, then leaned over to slap his face twice, forward and back. Tirado's head lolled and his eyes bulged. "Have I got your attention?" Garza yelled. "You have something you want to show us, don't you?"

Tirado's lips were gibbering, but no sound was coming out. Garza leaned over for another cuff, then gave it up. He turned to the remaining bodyguard and barked, "Where is it?"

The guy leaped behind the desk and snatched open a drawer. He pulled out a sheet of expensive watermarked paper and slipped it across the desk to Garza, who snatched it up and read. "I hope this isn't just about your damn kid being a faggot."

That seemed to rally Tirado out of his shock. He gave Garza a gaze of mild reproof and said, "That's not true. Adolfo was not...is not a homosexual. That rotten man..."

He got cut off by a voice from the door. Garza spun and drew, the Bad Cop--ever the pro--kept his gun on the surviving bodyguard. Tavo was standing there, looking natty but dogged. "He means me, Dad."

There was a long general silence after that little announcement. Everybody probably had their private thoughts. Mine were a quick game of connect-the-dots. If Tavo is Tirado's son, then his brother would be, too. Which means that Tirado's boss raped his son. Motive and opportunity clicking right in, and the method would follow pretty well with Garza running his errands for him. A secondary click in the old machine: that's why Borrego didn't want me around Tavo. "Well I guess that wraps it up. See my column on Friday." I thought I sounded relaxed and breezy, but nobody paid any attention.

It was a little surprising for a man as dry and waspish as Tirado, but in Mexico it's quite common for a man to maintain a _frente segundo_. Action on that "second front" can be as productive or torturous as any campaigns within the main family. If the secretary or whoever gets pregnant then there are two family hearths, the _casa grande_ and the _casa chica._ In fact, to judge by Tavo's clothes, manners, and schooling, the "little house" might not be all that little. Billable to his wife's fortune, I suddenly realized. Mexican women are doggedly accepting of these second families; conspiring to ignore them, and coping with illegitimate half-brothers suddenly showing up at the door. Mexican wives take a shamed pride in suffering in silence.

Tirado broke into the silence with a low, moaning voice. "Tavito, you could have told me this before."

Tavo stalked over to his desk and leaned on it to glare at him. "Right. You shipped us off to Guadalajara so nobody would even know we existed. You're a real champ at facing up."

I was pretty curious what Our Bro was going to say about that, but Garza butted in. "Enough of this _pinche_ family drama! None of this is a shock to anybody and it sure as shit doesn't matter any more."

Tirado even let that remark get by him. He was too busy moving his eyes from the dead man on his marble tiles to his son, now revealed as gay. I turned to face Garza. "He killed Varedas, didn't he? That matters." But even as I said it, I realized it didn't. I'd only cared because I thought the killers were after Mijares. Now they were going to kill me and the murder of the mayor was irrelevant. If Mazatlán was a kingdom he'd probably go down as Frederico the Irrelevant.

Except to Our Brother. He was all cut up about it. "Yes. I killed him. Put that in your newspaper, Mundo. I stood and watched horrible things done to him, did worse things myself. I wanted you to come so I could make a full confession."

Oh shit, not another confession. The cops seemed to have the same attitude.

"Right. You were about to confess to murder. To a reporter." The Bad Cop seemed to be overcome with the sheer stupidity of it. "Which is why you're both here."

Garza grinned. "Two turds with one stone."

Tirado's eyes ricocheted around the room. He finally decided that the fact that he was going to be killed took precedence over his son's sexual preference and the bloody murder already at hand. Though in an abstract sort of way. "You're going to kill two people? For telling the truth?"

"I count three. At least." Garza smirked at Tavo.

Bad Cop ticked them off. "You for being embarrassing. A murderer with a faggot son stashed away, give me a break. Sissy boy here for sticking himself into Varedas' business."

"His _puto_ brother in the hospital, for vice versa." Garza snorted at his own joke and Bad Cop smiled a little before going on. "And Mundo here knows too much. Except to stay clear."

"And because he's an asshole who's long overdue," Garza was quick to add. With feeling.

Tirado looked at me, almost in tears. "I just wanted to make sure he got everything he deserved. And for everybody to know it. You're not going to understand this, but I was sort of acting for the population at large."

"As a matter of fact, I understand that very well. Do you think it will be appreciated?" I really wondered.

"Do you appreciate it?"

"More every day, actually."

He looked at Tavo, beseechingly. "Do you understand what I've done?"

"Killing Varedas? Sure. I went to do it myself."

That seemed to bother Tirado even more. He stared at Tavo and sighed. "I took the sins of all on myself. And for what? I have governors telling me what to do. Publicists tell me what to do. I'm in the power of the police. In the power of agents."

I was sick of Easter metaphors. I told him, "Welcome to Power to the People."

He leaned forward, shaking. He picked up the paper from the desk and stared at it. Slowly, he turned to the bodyguard behind him. "You both knew about this. You betrayed me."

Garza laughed. "Don't worry about them. If you find an official murdered and the bodyguards aren't dead, they'll never get hired again."

The guard stiffened and stared, seeing the double-cross he should have known was coming. He was already way behind the pitch, with everybody looking right at him. He ducked behind Tirado and pulled out a pistol, aimed it at his head. Then he froze, realizing he hadn't made the brightest pick for his hostage. Suddenly, with no sound or warning, his head exploded and he seemed to slam himself onto the floor. Lobo the Wolfman stepped into the room, holding a long-barreled automatic pistol. He pulled a ruptured condom off the end of it and snapped on another one from his pocket. "Like they say on the _tele_ , 'Take the time to put it on...it could mean your life."

Lobo surveyed the scene from under his shaggy thatch and bushy unibrow. He spat in the general direction of the cops. It wasn't quite like the Red October showdown, but there were still too many guns and unclear motives in the room to suit me. And way too much tension. "What a bunch of _pendejos_ ," Lobo growled, "You killed off the bodyguards before the kidnappers even showed up."

Momo and Pepito sidled into the room from behind him with leveled _cuernos de chiva_. Momo covered Garza grimly, while Pepito moved to disarm Bad Cop. Unfortunately his inexperience showed: as he came up to the wily cop, he cut between him and Lobo. In the second of being hidden, Bad News reacted with the same snake-like speed. He jabbed the gun up into the kid's face, snatched the Kalashnifoff from his hands, and gripped him by the neck. Spinning the boy to face his father, he punched the barrel of his gun into his ear and spoke in a low, smooth tone. "That's enough of that shit. Drop the guns." As an ironic afterthought he added, "In the name of the law."

He never even heard it coming. His back was turned to the desk where Tavo stood by his father: feeble geezer and skinny fairy presenting no threat. So he didn't see Tavo pick up the paperweight; a gold, engraved baseball with a pen sticking out of it. I'd estimate the solid metal ball moved only four meters and was going 150 kilometers an hour when it hit the back of his skull. No break, no junk, just pure old-fashioned smoke. Bet your ass it killed him. He lunged into Pepito, then slumped to the floor. Before he hit Momo had emptied his _cuerno de chivo_ into his body.

I let go of my elbows. Garza stared sullenly when my cellular phone slid out of my sleeve into my hand. I opened it and listened. "It's dead now." Untrue, but I couldn't resist taunting him. "I scooped it into my sleeve in the bathroom. I was scared stiff somebody would call me while we were in the car." Apparently when I punched Tavo's number he almost hung up, then heard the background conversation and acted. He called the bar, gave Momo the address, and headed over by himself. Alone and unarmed: one gutsy guy. But Garza didn't really need the details to spoil his day.

I picked up Tirado's paper from the desk and sure enough, the real thing. "Signed and even witnessed."

"Witnessed what?" Momo asked while jamming his rifle into Garza's ample gut.

Lobo had walked up behind me, so I just handed it to him.

He scowled at the paper, but took it and fumbled with it , complaining that he hadn't brought his glasses.

I reached for the pair of reading glasses in Tirado's vest pocket, "Here, he can't use them anyway, after you blindfold him." But as I turned around I saw Pepito shaking his head violently, pointing to Lobo's back. I paused, glanced through the lenses, and said, "Hell, nobody could read anything with those binoculars."

Pepito sauntered up to the table and snicked the paper from Lobo's hands, glanced at it and snorted. "Says he killed Varedas. Says he had it coming." Lobo gave an appreciative rumble and turned to the matter at hand. Pepito gave me a blank stare and I got the picture. The wolfman doesn't want to admit he's illiterate. Hell, he probably voted for Varedas.

"Hey Lobo. Did you vote for these clowns?"

"Not for this nerd, but yeah, Varedas. He coulda made a difference in this town."

"Well, he's sure doing that. Even dead."

"Amen, Mary and Joseph."

I shook my head. "Jesus Christ."

"Him, too."

Tirado broke in with, "What do you mean by blindfolded?" Which shows literacy isn't the same as intelligence, I suppose.

"Could you wait just a minute? I asked him politely. "There's an item of business still on the table."

I walked up to Garza, who spit at me. Momo instantly kicked his knees out from under him, slamming him alongside the head as he fell. He rolled over and looked at me malevolently.

I squatted down on my heels to look right into him. I told him I wanted to know about the Infiernillo roust and no doubt about it. "And I mean the whole story. You tell me the whole thing, right now."

Garza gave me a dismissive sneer. "Make me."

I nodded ruefully. "I don't seem to be any good at that stuff."

Garza's sneer became a full-face taunt.

"So it's a good thing Lobo's here."

Lobo loped over to Garza and stood looking down at him out of his distant, lunatic eyes. He was panting heavily like a huge dog, his hands hanging limp and wide-spaced. The bleeding cop sized him up, saw what he was up against. He shrugged, "Fuck it. What do I care? We were ordered. By a superior officer out of Mexico City." He spat, cleansing his mouth of capitulation. But it wasn't anywhere near enough.

"Who?"

"A guy called Raul Chagón."

"You mean Chaco? Doc Savage?"

"Oh, you've heard of him? Yeah, he came in, directed operations for awhile, called a few shots, then wandered off. It's what he does. Fuck with me and you might get to meet him. God help you."

"Nah, he likes me. I pulled a thorn out of his paw." Or just maybe, I thought, vice versa. "But the point is: who was Chaco acting for? Who was behind it?"

"No idea. "

"Hey, Lobo?"

"Eh!" His ears actually stood up.

"Give him some ideas."

Lobo snorted and jumped on Garza, ravishing him on the floor like an animal. Garza made motions of resisting, but we have no real defense against being eaten by ravaging animals. Our fear of it goes too deep. Lobo latched onto his ear and started worrying it while Garza screamed in rage and pain. When you could hear it turn to fear, Lobo gave a jerk of his head and spit out part of the ear. I called him off and he moved away, but stayed on all fours, blood dripping off his grin. Garza couldn't _wait_ to tell me all he knew.

He held both hands over his ear, blood streaming through the fingers, and howled, "Who the fuck you THINK it was?"

" _Hijole_ , do you mean to say...Them?"

"Who else? You think the PRI just rolled over and died? "

"But why? They elected Varedas."

"Yeah, but he was the short game, you know. They wanted to break him away from the poor, smear the party a little. They were going to set him up for removal later, probably a drug bust. Then the governor appoints a new guy who packs the cabinet with PRI people. The PT assholes come back to the PRI by election time."

"They just used us to get into power?' Tirado was having a night of tough realizations.

"What else, you stupid old fart? But _killing_ him? Christ, he'll be a martyr now, probably for years. And _you_ get to be mayor. A total fuckup. You people can't do anything right."

Momo stuck his rifle into Garza's bloody throat. "That's enough out of you."

I stood there with the Truth. Running through my hands like sand. I started to say something to Tavo about it, but he was standing by the Bad Corpse, looking sickened. I started towards him, but he bent to pick up the gold baseball. He wiped the blood off with his expensive shirttail and looked at the engraving. Almost to himself he said, "The intercollegiate championships. You kept this?"

I could barely hear Tirado; his voice was drained and feeble. "Of course, I kept it. I treasure it. I love you boys and I'm proud of you both. I just can't... My wife..."He stopped, then spread his hands towards Tavo. "Can you forgive me?"

Tavo looked at the ball again, then tossed it up, bounced it off his bicep, caught it, and dropped it on top of the body. "Sure, Pops. I forgive you. Let's talk about it when you get back."

"Back?"

Momo was brisk and businesslike. "Yeah, and we'd better get going. Pepito, handcuff the cop. If he so much as spits, blow his kneecaps. Lobo, let's sort 'em out."

" _Andale, pues_...we've never really taken anybody this big before. We'd better bag him up, take him out to the Esquinapa place."

"You think the city will pay to get him back?" I wasn't very up on kidnapping procedures.

Lobo howled, "Of course not, ya putz. _Burrocratas_ get murdered, not kidnapped. Who'd pay for them?"

Pepito stood up from cuffing Garza, added, "Journalists are even more worthless. Who cares if they get killed? Why do you think we never put your head in a sack?"

"Weren't up to the chore of cutting my ears off?"

"Go for the dick, less work. Actually, who'd qualify most is your little Srta. Gortari. We'd love to get our hands on her."

"I'll bet you would. Well, she'd be a handful."

"Who's the Mayor's wife, Mundo?" Momo was busy pulling a heavy, olive-colored plastic bag out of a rucksack. "Do you smell the coffee yet?"

"Oh, right, she's an Osuna. _Café Molino_ heiress."

"Exactly. I figure she's good for our biggest payday ever. We considered Tavo here, but his mother doesn't have any money. Doubt his stepmom would pay the freight."

"Besides," Pepito put in, "If you had a faggot son, would you pay to get him back?"

"I certainly would," Tirado said firmly. He seemed to be coming around a little.

"No way," Pepito snapped. "If I was a fag I wouldn't even pay to get me back. I'd just tell me to kill myself."

Tavo, bland and sincere, said, "Well, if everybody felt that way, we wouldn't have any problems would we?"

"No, I guess not." Pepito seemed glad to have made his point. The little dipshit.

"So we'll settle for bagging _Señor Alcalde_ here," Lobo chimed in. "And ol' _Capitán Gárfio_ as a little bonus. There's people who'll pay for him, don't worry. Pick his so-called brains, just for openers."

Pepito glanced down at Garza. "Doubt you'll ever be seeing him again, actually."

I'll you do," Lobo rumbled, "He'll probably be wearing lipstick and a mini-skirt."

"You're just saying that to turn my stomach."

"So that's it," Momo said. "Everybody accounted for. All the bodies here will make it a very authentic nab. Dead cop will give those pricks on _Comandante_ Simón's squad a few things to scratch their heads over. Leave the asshole's gun, too, just to muddy the water."

He stepped over to Tirado, shaking out some manacles, ropes, and the military body bag. "So if you'll just slide into our custody here."

Tirado eyed the restraints calmly. "Wait a minute. Could I ask a question?"

Momo looked at his wristwatch pointedly, but nodded.

"They want to kill me, right?"

Momo thought about that one, glanced at me. "After you're back from a kidnapping that could be pinned on them? " I asked him. "I'd say it's very likely. I mean apart from them wanting you out so they can run in one of their puppets."

"So you blackmail them," Lobo pointed out helpfully. "Besides, you'll have plenty of bodyguards after this."

Tirado gave a telling look at the dead bodyguards. Momo got his point.

"Well, you know, maybe you should try hiring some real professionals."

"People who know the napping racket in and out," Pepito added. "Family organization."

The Mayor took a long look at the kidnappers and you could see realignments going on inside his head. He said, "I suppose we'll have time to talk about all this."

"Hopefully not too much time," Momo said. "We like a quick turnaround, and the expenses of keeping somebody hidden run kind of steep."

"Of course," Pepito stuck in, "In your case I'm sure it will be worth it."

"The Poor Come First," Lobo growled, "But the Rich Come Dear."

Momo stayed behind a minute after Lobo and Pepito carried their two victims out, cocooned and limp. He looked around, surveying the crime scene, mentally checking if anybody had touched anything, looking at the positions of the bodies.

I said, "Tirado thinks everything's going to be all right."

He shrugged, "Let him. Once we collect, we're out of the picture. We've got too much pride in our craft to take government jobs." He glanced at me, "Oops, sorry, Mundo."

"No, no, you're right. Anyway, I'd already quit."

"Well, maybe you can work your way up to criminal scum." He shook our hands and walked out. Tavo and I stood alone in a blood-sprayed room, looking after him.

"You know, I do feel a little bad about Our Brother," I finally said. "I mean, your father."

"Don't. He's an asshole."

"Okay, I can see that. Hell, you should have kidnapped him yourself."

"Well, I sort of did. Those guys are going to pay me twenty percent of the ransom."

" _A poco_? You're too much." I didn't know how much I'd needed to laugh, and when I did we both broke up. After a few minutes of overly-enthusiastic good humor I asked him, "But why should they pay you anything?"

"My fee for bringing them over here and turning them on to the job. We worked it out on cell phone while we were tearing over here to see if you were dead yet."

"Well, thanks a lot for that. Just don't tell anybody I had to get rescued by a homo, okay? The nuns were bad enough."

"Your secret is safe. You can loan me gas money until I get my cut."

"You sure they're going to pay you? Newsflash...those guys are dangerous armed criminals."

"Not to mention homophobes. But they came through for you, didn't they? They've got a sense of fair play, I think. Besides, you know where they live, don't you? And where their kid crosses the street to reform school?"

"So we could be partners in extorting armed maniacs? Fabulous."

We'd walked out into a sort of family den and Tavo pulled me over to a wall gallery of portraits; from big cibachromes to century-old oils. "Three Carnival Queens right on that wall, two Flower Games. My half-sisters have suffered from their failure to provide the family with another Queen."

"And now they have you."

"They'll be so thrilled. Check this one out, 1971. My wicked stepmother: Yadira III, Queen of Neptune. That's her halfwit buddy Consuelo, Queen of Flower Games. Maybe I would make a fetching Queen."

"You'd have to lose the mustache."

"Oh, really? Take a closer look at Consuelo, there."

"Boy, you're out of the closet twenty minutes and you're already getting catty."

"So will you. When you figure out you can't use anything you heard tonight."

"I have a private collection."

"You'd best keep it that way. This is Chinatown, Jake."

I realized at that moment why Masons have secret handshakes... the kick of instantly recognizing other members of their cult. I threw my arm over his shoulder and walked towards the door. "Louie, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship."

 _Copyright 1988 Wenatchee Girl Music_

Just gimme one more shot of that Jose Cuervo

And I'll be headin' on down, to the boundry of Mexico

One more bottle of Tequila to go

I'll get the salt and lemon when I'm swimmin'

Down in Smugglers Cove

Well I have run a few guns across somebody's enemy lines

I've flown in a few tons of sinsemilla in a B-29

I've done Swiss-made watches and leather huaraches

Sometimes I've even moved a little Coke.....a Cola

I'm just supply demand without the duty or the excise man

I'll be makin' a break from takin' over contraband

I might trade you this hash for some cash and a Volkswagen van

I'll be heading for the border with my papers in order

Taking my departure south of Puerto Vallarta

Gonna get myself nice down in Smugglers' paradise

There are rusty old freighters sitting down at the dock

Full of Panama Red, full of Peruvian rock

Seaplanes loaded with their quota of imported booze

There are shadowy bars with flamenco guitars

Señoritas with their eyes like stars...

I just think I could use some kind of tropical kind of a cruise

It's just the right site for living high while you're lying low

If you're feeling flush or had a brush with the Border Patrol

So mellow out on that beach and reach for that Mescalito

Drink something cold and wet

And watch the sun set on Smugglers Cove

Just gimme one more shot of that Jose Cuervo

And I'll be headin' on down, to the boundry of Mexico

One more bottle of Tequila to go

I'll find the salt and the lemon and the women

Down in Smugglers Cove

COPS

The **policía** or **patrulla** like to be called **oficial** (oh fee cee AHL), meaning "officer". But are likely to be called **la chota** (CHO tah), similar to "the law" or "the heat" or possibly **placas** (PLAH cahs)--"badges". Other terms like **azul, tamarindo, jaiba, chocolate, chocomilk** derive from uniform color, but some terms for traffic cops like **lobo** (wolf) or **feroz** (fierce) stem from the profound Mexican hatred for the cops that hit them up for bribes ( **mordida** ) on the streets. A cop on the "take" is a **mordelón**. The "paddy wagon" is **júlia.**

JAIL AND PRISON

Terms for jail ( **cárcel, calabozo** ) are **tambo** or **bote** (BO tay--"the can") and a common street term for prison (or **la peni,** from **penitenciaria** ) is **la pinta** (la PEEN tah), derived from the expression **hacer pinta** (to play hooky from school.

CRIME

A grab bag of underworld terminology:

Criminals of any age are **delinquentes** in Mexico, and crimes are **delitos**. Mexicans are fond of the term **mafia** and use it all over the place, but actually most organized crime here stems from **lo narco** , meaning "the drug business". This spawns a whole raft of related words like **narcocultura** (like musicians posing with machine guns, or lady's necklaces with little gold AK-47's on them), **narcomayoreo** and **narcomenudeo** (drug wholesale and retail **), narcocorridos** (country songs glorifying the drug trade). In that context you find **padrinos** (godfather, as in the mafia movie) and **madrinas** (godmother: referring to cops who are moles or moonlight as gangsters and hitmen).

The major force in crime recently has been an organization known as **Zetas** (letter "Z") and that term is starting to replace **mafiosos** for describing the mob. More recently there have arisen **sudozetas** (pseudoZetas), who pose as **Zetas** (and yes, that's absolutely crazy).

**Sequestros** (say KWAY strohs)--kidnappings--are a huge business that spawns some colorful characters like **Mochadedos** and **Mochaorejas** , nicknames for nabbers who cut off fingers and ears, respectively, of their captives. Quickie nabbings, perhaps just forcing somebody to use their ATM card, are termed **sequestro express**. (There's a cool movie by that name, by the way. )

About The Creators

