

### Retribution

### by

### David LaGraff

Copyright © 2013 David LaGraff. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

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### Chapter 1

When I got home to the 10th floor roach-infested firetrap I lived in across the street from the downtown Los Angeles Greyhound station, Billy Ahiga was waiting for me. Which was unusual, since he'd been in the VA, the one out on Wilshire, for the past couple of weeks, waiting to die from the same rare blood disease that'd killed his father. He didn't call first because being as how I have a certain incurable technophobia, I don't have a phone. So he didn't call, he simply left the VA and came.

Billy is full-blooded Navajo, and the disease had something to do with that. Billy said it was a virus that entered the Navajo population because of the bats in New Mexico, but there was no scientific proof of that. Myself, I speculated it was something Billy picked up tunnel crawling in the Ashau Valley a lifetime ago. Wherever it came from, the damn thing incubated for years before it blew up. Years ago, when we met in Nam, he'd told me about it, how it had taken his father and how it would take him too, when it was ready. The disease attacks the connective tissues in the final stages before ultimately turning the body into a stinking bag of bloody pus. Since the disease only killed native Americans, and mostly the ones who also drank too much, as Billy had, there wasn't any big national program. Nobody was working on a cure or anything. After Billy died, there wouldn't be any men coming over wearing biohazard space suits to see about a cleanup.

He wasn't a bag of pus yet, but from the smell of him, it wouldn't be much longer. He'd taken up a reclining position on my big red leather couch. In spite of the smell, Homicide, the stray alley cat who was sometimes fed by me, had come in from the fire escape and was asleep on Billy's stomach, an affection the tattered, vicious beast had never shown me.

Outside, it was one of those bright, clean February days in L.A. where some hot winds had gusted in from someplace farther south, blowing all the chemical stink out to sea, and the temperature had shot up into the 80's. Inside, the air was overly heated from the sun beating down on the roof. There was a sense of claustrophobia, amplified by the smell of his disease. I put the window cooler on and in a few seconds the air began to cool the sweat on our bodies, blow the stink out the window and make the place bearable. As bearable as a rat trap like my place ever gets.

"You smell like shit," I said.

"They killed my son," he said.

"Who did?"

"Some gang bangers, I think. They shot him when they went in to rob that Trader Joe's store near the VA. David was in there buying me a Hostess cherry pie and a Coke and they shot him in the head."

He fished out a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. There was a Beverly Hills address, and a woman's name. "My son's mother," he said. "Her name is Angela Caldwell. She'll be expecting you to call her. She has some information for you." Billy had never been married. He hadn't watched his son grow up, but two years ago, his son had found him and they'd had a reconcilement of sorts. Leastways enough of one for the son's death to arouse Billy to the maximum level of anger. Which was why I figured he'd come to see me.

"I'll talk with the boy's mother," I said. "And then I'll find the men who did this and kill them."

"No. That would only be revenge. And revenge isn't enough. It's got to be more than that. I want--" he was interrupted by a convulsion which sent Homicide scurrying under the couch. There was an explosion of blood with the coughing fit, most of which sprayed me right in the face, and when it was over, he lay still. His lips were moving but no sound came out. I put my ear to his mouth. "--retribution," he said, then died.

I thought about it. Retribution. The word had an uncommon meaning to Billy and me. When we were partnered up in Southeast Asia doing our thing together, retribution meant killing everybody, down to the last man, woman and child, and generally burning everything to the ground before, during, and afterwards, and so forth. Because stuff happened over there. Lots of stuff. Evil things. Me and Billy had been a component of the war machine, and it had left indelible marks on our souls. Our divergent life paths had crossed in the Navy, where we'd been sorted and graded and packaged into an experimental training program now known as the SEALS.

You may disagree with what we did over there. And perhaps you would have done things differently. Perhaps you would have shown mercy when one of your best friends handed a stick of gum to a cute little toddler and the child exploded in his face, shredding what used to be your drinking buddy all over a pig wallow. Maybe you'd have smiled and shown infinite patience to the old woman who tried to slash you with a machete while you were in the latrine. Maybe you're one of those bastards who thinks violence isn't mandatory to maintain the peace, that war is merely one of many options and that peaceful negotiations, if given enough time and effort, are the nobler, higher path. If so, you're a better man than Billy and I. More power to you. Just let me know where it is you'll be buried so I can come often and piss on your saintly remains.

I looked down at Billy, or what used to be Billy. He no longer looked like a man bent on retribution, just a tired old man whose years had been few and bitter. An old man who frowned in death, a frown he would carry into the afterlife where he would doubtless make the bitter complaint to God that he had suffered the hideous misfortune of outliving his only son.

Billy still had his long braids, and the big sixteen-inch Bowie strapped to his side, which he'd carried since he was thirteen years old, the one passed down to him by his father, who'd been given it by his grandfather, who, it was said, had taken it off a luckless trapper someplace in the Superstition Mountains in the late 1800's. I gently removed the knife and scabbard, which was leather and of superior workmanship. I went into the bathroom and washed Billy's blood off my face and lathered up and tested the blade on my three day growth. The blade was sharp enough for a clean, close shave.

You may be offended by what I did next, which was to dump Billy's corpse from my rear bedroom window into the alleyway below. You might have a point. A normal man would have called somebody, maybe the cops, or maybe an ambulance. But I'm not a normal man. I don't want city officials poking around in my apartment, taking note of things and reporting those things to the proper authorities. Because I cannot afford to have elevated encounters with law enforcement, or have them taking special notice of me.

I live by a code, a simple one. I will not let anybody arrest me again. The Navy arrested me, once, after a 57 day stay in a military hospital in Japan owing to a sniper bullet in my back. They came to me and led me away when I was in a weakened condition, and I let them. I remember the night they came for me. I was still in my pajamas. I said to myself, It's a mistake. It'll all be straightened out in the morning. It wasn't. They brought me before a tribunal. You're under arrest for the murder of a full bird colonel, they said. Indeed, I explained, I had killed a colonel, but it wasn't murder. I did it because he was dirty, channeling drugs out of the Golden Triangle and into the United States by way of Mexico. He was making a lot of money and some of that money was going to Charlie. The colonel was in a sampan full of Charlies and I blew the sampan to hell. It turned out the colonel was a Congressman's son and they convicted me of murder and sentenced me to life. They chained me naked to the floor of an iron cage in an unlisted prison nobody's ever heard of. It took me ten years to escape. They won't arrest me again.

So I threw Billy out my window. I wasn't sloppy about throwing him outside. I checked to make sure he wouldn't land on a sleeping addict or anything, then I let him fall. His smashed body in the alley below would appear a suicide, and it wasn't likely any cops would come to my door. Billy had only one friend that I knew of, and that was me. Nobody was going to miss him, save myself and possibly Homicide, the cat, who for some strange reason had taken a liking to Billy.

Billy'd ruined my couch, the one decent piece of furniture I owned, stained by a sudden massive release of blood from certain of Billy's orifices, not least of which were his nose and eye sockets. So I wiped the couch down and threw a bedspread over it to hide the bloodstains, went into the kitchen, popped a can of Mr. Pibb, pulled out my bottle of pepper vodka and poured myself a couple of fingers in his memory. Wondering if Billy could see me, or was he now in a place where the world didn't matter any more.

"Here's looking at you, Billy," I said, knowing damn well he could see me.

### Chapter 2

The address Billy gave me was in Beverly Hills, a problem for me because I was a bit low on funds at the moment. I do not own a car. Fortunately, I have my connections at the Greyhound station across the street and one of the regular day drivers, a salty old jarhead named Weathers who had the Santa Barbara run, gave me a freebie to the Hollywood terminal, from which I blew my absolute last dollar on a cab to the address in question. After which I found myself standing in front of a high stucco wall with a big iron gate, a speaker box and a couple of cameras. Enough security to give the occupants warning should something wicked their way come. There was an old brass plaque embedded in the wall. The Dell. You know you've made it to the top when your house has a name. Perhaps I would name my place. The Dump. There was no button to press. Which meant they had somebody watching full time, or some other method of alerting them to the presence of strangers.

"Wha' chew want?" the woman's voice over the speaker was clear, Spanish accented, and by it's lack of spark I could tell that my image in the monitor had failed to impress. I could also tell they had no salaried security flunky working the grounds. What amounted to a fatal breach of security the way I saw it. Because when somebody wants to kill you, you need somebody else to stop them. Not many assassins get killed by cameras or monitors.

"I'm looking for Angela Caldwell," I said. "Billy sent me."

I waited a few more minutes while somebody thought this over, or called the cops, or did whatever it was people do when they look into a security monitor and see a scarred up, cranky old bastard who's a hair over six-foot seven and pushing three hundred fifteen pounds.

"Go away." This voice was mature female, Anglo, doubtless the mistress of the manor.

"My name's McDougal," I said. "Billy sent me."

"You've got five seconds to convince me or you'll have a Doberman on your ass."

"He came to my place this afternoon and said somebody killed his son."

"He did no such thing. He's unable to travel. Whoever you are, you're a sick freak and you should know we are well-armed. Security has been notified. And I'm letting the dogs out."

"Wait one," I said. I reached inside my big leather bag, the one I always carried with me, rain or shine, and pulled out the Bowie. Perhaps not the best idea to inspire someone to open a gate. But if she knew anything at all about Billy, she would know the knife, and know that anybody who had it was closer than a brother to the man.

"Where did you get that?"

"I got it from Billy."

"Billy had a nickname when he was in Vietnam. What was it?"

"They called him the Montagnard Monster."

Billy must have told the mother of his son, the woman named Angela Caldwell, to ask me that. The Montagnard Monster. Like some sort of code word. The gate swung smoothly open. There were no dogs making a try for my fountain of life. No squad cars sprouting shotgun toting officers to command me to kiss the bricks. The sun continued to shine. So I walked up the driveway.

I don't like walking uphill, by virtue of the shattered rib I received as a result of that sniper's bullet long ago. There's still about ten pieces of bone moving around inside me and at times, on the worst days, it's all I can do to get out of bed in the morning. Nonetheless, when one must jump to it, one must jump. I put the Bowie back in the bag and began the slow painful walk up the steep drive to the house, which, as I approached it, could clearly see was a very large mansion, even by Beverly Hills standards. The thing rested in what was a compound of forested grounds and outbuildings covering a good five acres. Perhaps if I was lucky, she would offer me a drink.

The front door opened and a woman came out to meet me. She was probably around fifty, but had the carriage and good looks of a former model. One of those women who'd never had the plastic work done because she didn't need it. She'd look good until the day she died and look even better dead in her coffin than most women did who were still alive. She was wearing a decent pair of running shoes and some old baggy sweats, none of which detracted from her beauty. She wore no makeup and her mouth was drawn tight and her eyes seemed to be staring at something just over my head, something ugly and perhaps too old to be counted in conventional numbers. She'd lost her son.

"You're a big one, aren't you," she said, looking up at me, by way of introduction. There was no handshake or any of the formal niceties, none of which I needed or required. "Billy told me he was sending somebody out, but we still had to put you through some kind of security check. I'm slurring my words, please forgive me. My shrink has me doped up to High Heaven so I don't die of shock. Let's go inside and I'll get you a drink."

The place had an entranceway big enough to warehouse the Spruce Goose, and a massive spiral staircase, and an impressive kitchen with a lot of real marble and copper pots. The furniture, to my surprise was mostly of the big and sturdy kind. A maid appeared.

"Juana, get McDougal, or whatever his name is, something to drink."

"I'll have tumbler of pepper vodka over crushed ice and a can of Mr. Pibb to chase it down," I said, enjoying the impossible specificity of my order. This wasn't the kind of place that carried Mr. Pibb, and the pepper vodka was also doubtful. We took seats opposite each other at the marble table, a gigantic, old, heavy slab from someplace in Italy, perhaps obtained from a garage sale at the Vatican, resting on massive iron legs probably crafted by some ancient Roman blacksmith. Maybe the same guy who made the nails for the cross, for all I knew. Juana disappeared and reappeared from somewhere, and in a matter of minutes had fulfilled my request to a T.

"I didn't think you'd have the Mr. Pibb," I said.

"My second husband was a staunch AA'er," she said. "He stocked every imaginable soft drink."

"Was? Is he off the wagon?"

"He passed away a year and a half ago," she said. "Heart disease. He left behind about twenty cases of Mr. Pibb that I'll never get rid of."

"Sorry."

"Would you like them?"

"Yes."

"I'll have my gardener drop them by your place."

"He better be in shape. I'm on the tenth floor and the elevator's out."

She looked at me, and for a moment I found the gaze of her blue eyes unsettling, as though she was seeing something more to me than I cared to reveal.

"Why did they call Billy the Montagnard Monster?" she asked

"Billy was something of a legend in Nam. He ran around in the mountains with no shirt on, carrying only the big Bowie knife, crawling into tunnels and wreaking a certain weirdly gruesome physical and psychological carnage, the kind only a devil with a big knife can make. As a result of which, he terrified everybody, and they wound up referring to him as the Montagnard Monster. Whenever there was a pile of dead Charlie's with their heads literally looking out of their asses, they knew the Monster had been there. Everybody feared Billy. As well they should have."

"Well, I deserve that information. But now I'm sorry I asked. You believe in telling things straight, don't you, McDougal?"

I nodded.

"I ... I don't know what Billy told you about ... about my--"

"--He told me somebody shot your son. That somebody shot David."

"Two days ago. The coroner won't release the body. I can't even give my son a decent burial. They told me it would have to be a closed casket ceremony. They said--"

Her tears escaped on the wave of great, sweeping gasps, and groanings which came from some primitive recesses so deep within her, they were doubtless medically uncharted. I sat. She cried. I sat some more. She cried some more. I drank some more pepper vodka. She reached, finally, for my glass and took a great gulp.

"Our son," she said, "David, was the by-product of a youthful romance during the Summer of Love in '67. That summer, Billy and I hung out together in Griffith Park. With his long braids and wearing that big knife, Billy the Indian had been a pretty cool dude to hang out with back then."

"I remember," I said. "They'd just made the movie, Billy Jack, and Indians were popular with all the Hippies."

She nodded. "When we met, at first, it was simply a free love kind of thing, but there was a spark that led us further than that, and we had a son together. I wanted to get married, but Billy got cold feet and went into the Navy before we could arrange anything. Afterward, after the war, Billy had a bad booze thing going on and couldn't get his head together and never came back to his woman and child. He wound up living in the tunnels underneath Union Station. At least until he sobered up a couple of years ago. Now he's got an apartment in El Segundo. I offered to move him to someplace nicer, but he refused."

I nodded.

"I never stopped loving Billy," she said. "At least some part of me never did. The doctors tell us he has only another couple of months' to live."

Stupid me. I remembered something I had forgotten to mention. "They were wrong. Billy's dead. He died in my living room."

"Dear God. Billy's dead? I'll have to bury them both." The shock of this additional news brought her to her feet and she reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny automatic pistol and slid it across the table towards me. An Accu-Tek V-25. A ladies weapon, or an expert's weapon, depending on how you look at it, tiny but with just enough punch to ruin your day if she peppered you in the groin at close range with the contents of its 6-round magazine.

"I want you to find my son's killers and kill them with this," she said.

"Don't need it. I carry my own."

She looked at my bag, the big leather one that was always strapped across my chest. "In that bag?"

I nodded.

"Let me see it." I opened the bag and she peered in. "My God. You've got enough crap in there to stop an army. Is that gray can with the yellow stripe a grenade? And what is this thing? It looks like a pipe bomb of some sort. Is it legal to carry stuff like that around? Just what in the hell are you doing with all that stuff? Aren't you afraid you'll be arrested?"

"They will never arrest me again."

She thought about this. I could see her wheels turning, trying to fit what I was into some sort of civilized framework. To make what I was somehow familiar.

"I can see Billy was right about you," she finally said.

"Right about what?"

"Billy said you could help me find whoever killed my son. He said that you were the only person he knew who was more dangerous than he was. He said you didn't have a soul. That he'd once seen you crush an old woman's skull in your bare hands after she tried to cut your balls off in the latrine."

"She was pissed off because I'd just burned down her village after the people there ambushed a friend of mine. I'd been up for three days on Green Hornets. I was fresh out of the milk of human kindness. But all that's in the past. And I do have a soul. My Granny's in Heaven right now praying for me. God is going to save me at the end. My Granny said He would."

"God won't save you," she said. "Because God doesn't save anybody. He just wound this whole thing up and let it go." She sipped at my pepper vodka for awhile. Somewhere off the entranceway, a Grandfather clock chimed. All about the place, dust settled in an attempt to reduce us all to itself. Juana reappeared and brought a fresh drink to help me cut the dust which was thickening in my throat. "I'm not a killer," she said. "In fact, I'm Catholic. Killing somebody would be a mortal sin. Calling you in was Billy's idea. He had his own way of looking at the spiritual side of things. He told me the hour of mercy for the men who killed his son ran out when they pulled the trigger. A week ago I would have disagreed. But now my son is dead. Now I understand what Billy was talking about. That's why he wanted you here. Because this situation calls for a killer."

"I'm not a killer," I said.

"Yes, you are. I can see it in your eyes. Your eyes are dead. There's no life shining out of them."

"I take no pleasure in killing."

"But you do it when it needs to be done."

"Listen lady, I'm just a man that bad people occasionally run into who helps them put a stop to their badness. I'm the reason people shouldn't do bad things. Because when people follow evil, they piss God off, and He causes their path to eventually cross mine."

"I can give you a car and some money," she said.

"Okay."

"And something more. A name. Of the man who killed my son. A retired cop friend of mine knows who did it."

"You know the name of the man who killed your son?"

"No. My friend didn't tell me. He's afraid I'll try something stupid. He's waiting to talk to you first. If he thinks you can handle the job, he's going to give you the name of the man who killed my son. Who shot David just because he was buying his dying father a cherry pie." She punched in a number on her cell phone. "You can talk to him now."

"I don't use telephones," I said.

"You don't what?"

"The last time I used a phone, somebody I loved got her heart shot out."

"What do you mean?"

"I had a woman in Saigon. Her name was Phan. My relationship upset the local assholes. They came for us, and I got on the radio telephone to call for backup. Because I had the phone in my hand, when the first man came through the window, I was too slow to get him first. By the time I'd dropped the phone, he'd already put three rounds into my lady's chest. So I don't use the telephone anymore."

"God."

"Gimme your cop friend's address and I'll go see him."

She disconnected her call and scribbled the cop's address on an expensive piece of tear-off Crane note paper, using a gold fountain pen which, if pawned, could have kept me in Big Macs for a decade.

"What's your first name?" she said. "Not that I need to know it. I just think we should be on a first name basis if we're going partners on killing the man who shot David."

"I told you my name already. It's McDougal."

"No. That's too awkward. Tell me your real name."

"You don't need to know that. But you can call me John. Billy was the one person in the world allowed to call me that, and now he's gone. So I'll pass the privilege on to you."

"John. I guess it will have to do."

"Okay, Angela. Is that about it?" I asked this, knowing the answer already. I could see in her pained eyes that there was unfinished business yet to come.

"No, John. That's not all. There's something more."

"Yes?"

"When you kill him, I want a trophy."

I raised my eyebrows. Not many people knew that kind of lingo. A trophy in military jargon was when you cut something off somebody and wore it around your neck, or dried it and kept it in a souvenir bag. "What kind of trophy do you want?"

"I want his head in a bag. After I barbecue it, I'm going to feed it to my dogs."

"No," I said. "I understand the feeling. But no."

"You have to. On your honor as a Navy SEAL. And because you owe it to Billy, because he saved your life."

"I am not a Navy SEAL. I owe them nothing. I paid them everything already. I paid them with three thousand six hundred and fifty days of sitting naked in a steel box in a military prison with no name of my own and no known public address."

She regarded me coldly, and in her intense blue eyes I could see only the hardness of unrefracted light. "Big deal. You spent ten years in jail. But now you're out. You're free. You understand nothing. I am a mother. My only son is dead. He will spend the rest of eternity in a steel box. He will never be out. He will never be free. I will feed the killer's head to my dogs. After I do that, I will go to confession and confess that I have no remorse, no forgiveness, and I will then demand that God apologize to me for having offended me." She slid some car keys to me, along with an envelope containing what would turn out to be about twenty grand in cold hard cash. "It's the silver Mercedes in the garage," she said, rising and leaving me alone.

The car was a convertible roadster, the big one, with the twelve cylinder motor. In Southern California, in February, when it rains it pours, but today it was sunny. I hit the push-button and put the top up against the sun and eased the surprisingly quiet vehicle out, stopping at the massive stone fountain when I realized I was being chased from behind by the dead boy's mother. I rolled down the window.

"I'm going with you," she said.

"You're not going anywhere. Go back inside and get drunker. I'll be back with the head later."

"I'm going with you. I want to take the trophy myself. When we find the killer, you're going to hold him down and I'm going to cut his head off while he's still alive--with this!" To emphasize this remark, she brandished a small steak knife in my face. The knife had a serrated edge fitted to a handle made from a deer antler. Her hand wrapped around the deer antler was white-knuckled. I noticed all the nails were bitten down to the quick and the rest could have used a good polish. I could smell the acid scent of too much grief, fear and alcohol. Her body swayed slightly in the glare of the fountain, it's spray sparkling bright in the sun and in spite of myself I could see she had once been a proud woman, whose statuesque figure suggesting a gait and carriage she no longer possessed, reduced as it was by recent events, doomed to finish life in a less grand manner, compacted, cowed, and pushed a fraction closer to the grave by the awful weight of her son's death.

I should have parked the car right there, tossed the money in her face and walked away. I should have done that, just as I should have done a lot of things over the years. But I didn't do it, I didn't do what I should have done, what my Granny would have told me to do, which was why I was who I was and where I was, and why my life had turned out as sorry as it had, instead of turning out better, with a family and a career, perhaps as a professional football player, or a sleazy politician, or a career Navy man, or, because of my devotion to duty, buried and forgotten in a prisoner's grave someplace in North Dakota.

"Leave the knife," I said. "If we catch him, you can use Billy's Bowie. It has a heavy blade. That way, you can chop most of the killer's head off at the get go. It'll be less work."

She tossed her kitchen knife into the fountain and got in. And we left to go see the retired cop who had the inside dope on the man who had killed her son.

### Chapter 3

She called him on her cell phone to alert him to our arrival. Apparently the cop's name was Johnson. I did not hear her use a first name. We hit the McDonald's drive-through on Sunset, ordering a goodly quantity of their foodstuffs, before continuing in an easterly direction towards Hollywood, finally taking Canyon Drive north into the Hollywood Hills. The retired cop lived at the top of a short, steep driveway in a clean three story place set into the hill in a neighborhood which at night would seem like a Storybook Land, with its old street lamps, winding streets and peek-a-boo cottages. You could almost feel the ghosts of Gable and Lombard lurking about, wondering where the next party was. I did a three point turn in the narrow street and parked facing down the hill. A dog in the back began to bark. A heavy-throated sound, but controlled, like a Shepherd who knew his business, to wit, eat intruders who by the smell of them carried bags full of guns, knives, Big Macs and grenades.

"I've never seen anybody order six Big Macs at one time," she said. "And eat five of them in twenty minutes."

"Life is short. Carpe diem."

"You're a pig. It's no wonder you're so big and fat, the way you eat." She poked my belly, then brushed the rest of my arm and shoulder with her palm. "God. You're not fat. You're some kind of genetic freak, aren't you? You're one of those men that has a cave man gene, like the Bible talks about. One of those giants who lived on the earth in the book of Genesis. Like Goliath."

"Your cop friend was dirty when he was on the force," I said. "No cop lives in a two million dollar pad like this without stealing dope money or ripping off pimps."

"Wrong. He married a rich girl. They met after she was raped and left for dead. She survived and they fell in love."

"What's your connection to this cop?"

"His wife and I see the same shrink."

I heard the cough of a human command in a foreign language, probably German. The dog stopped barking and a man appeared at the side gate looking down at us. It was not a friendly face, set as it was in a permanent squint. The features were heavy in the brow and the jaw, perhaps Norwegian. He had the little salt and pepper cop's mustache they all have. The upper body posture was that of a veteran, big-shouldered, loose, world-weary, and with not an ounce of give should it come to a shoving match. From his thinning gray hair, I could see he was about my age, and doubtless had watched the bodies pile up in Nam, as had I. Perhaps he had piled up a great deal of bodies himself over there.

There is a brotherhood. No matter how much the elite leftist wimps would like to eradicate it. It remains as long as our blood flows through our veins. I looked up at Johnson and saw my brother. In some respects, the awareness gave me the feeling we were still in the jungle. He had the advantage, the high ground, and presented only a partial profile over the gate, with the wall of his house a sufficient shielding buttress should I suddenly bust a few caps in his direction. I was certain if trouble began, Johnson was capable of unleashing a real shit storm from the safety of his three story pad. As if that wasn't enough, he was joined at the gate by a trusted friend. A Shepherd who stood upright at the gate, took point and gave me a knowing stink eye, his big grinning jaws laughing at me. I knew the look. It was a dog who knew men and had confidently and savagely defeated them in countless chases through the brush infested Santa Monica mountains, or in cramped apartment hallways in South Central. A retired LAPD K-9. The kind which kept his massive head down and went straight for the testicles, of which it can be said mine were retracting fully at the sight of him.

"C'mon John, turn off the motor and let's go inside," she said.

"No. Tell your cop friend to come down to the car without the dog."

"Don't be ridiculous. We're going inside. Johnson's going to make us a fresh batch of rum sours. I've had them before. It's his wife's recipe, with real powdered sugar and everything. C'mon, John."

It all sounded so civilized. Like we were just a couple of tennis buddies stopping by a friend's place after a sweaty morning at the club. I realized why. Her voice, a rich contralto, had a natural honey to it. A music that a man could probably listen to forever. Correction. That I could listen to forever. I tried to stuff the thought, but it was out, and expanding inside me faster than a hollow point round in the heart. I had been without a woman for more than two years, and my last encounter had ended in my girlfriend's death from a well placed government sniper round to her head. I looked at Angela and she caught me looking and crossed her arms over her chest and I knew my face was growing red.

"See anything you like?" she said. "Because if you do, you can forget it. I'm not the cave woman type."

"Why do you call him Johnson?" My voice was a notch higher and in spite of the air conditioning it was getting hot in the car. From somewhere far away, I could hear her voice.

"His first name is Edward, but he hates it. Everybody calls him Johnson, even his wife. Now let's go. You can trust him, believe me."

"I trust nobody. Tell him to come down here. Without the dog." The dog, I knew, could jump the gate, but it would give me an extra second in case things weren't what they seemed. When you live by a code, it can make you paranoid. There were a lot of people who'd like to see me back in prison. I wasn't sure yet if Johnson was one of them or not.

Angela yelled. "He wants you to come down!"

To my surprise, Johnson did, opening the gate and descending the three short flagstone walkways to the driveway and down to the car. He smiled at Angela and then at me. It wasn't a true smile, but he made the attempt to show some teeth.

"Johnson, this is the man who is going to kill my son's murderer," Angela said, by way of introduction. "He won't come inside because he doesn't know if he can trust you."

Johnson didn't even twitch. "C'mon in soldier," he said. "The war's over. You're looking at a fat old retiree with nothing to do all day." Johnson wore a stained white short-sleeved dress shirt, stretched by his big gut, the rag worn untucked over old baggy black trousers, exactly what I'm sure he wore in the days when he was putting endless varieties of diseased repeat offenders on ice. There was something else he wore.

"Why the piece?" I asked, referring to the bulge of something small and lethal right about the beltline, just above where his hernia repair scar probably was.

"I'm not carrying for your benefit," he said. "The truth is, a lot of people hate me. And some of them know where I live. Look, it's hot out here, and they just removed a small lesion from the top of my balding head. Why don't we go inside like civilized people? I just made a fresh batch of sours. If the ice in the shaker melts, they'll be too watered down to be of much use."

Hell is for heroes. I shut down the machine and we got out into the too hot February glare. Johnson eyed my big leather bag but said nothing. He was extending his trust to me in a thousand silent ways. Bending first, not out of weakness, but out of respect for Angela, and whatever it was she meant to Johnson's wife. We both have the same shrink. Probably as much of a bond as was possible in the New Age we were in, where absolute truth had been consigned to hell and transitional truths were created fresh daily to fit in with whatever current brand of cyber tribal funk you subscribed to. So Johnson bowed to me out of respect for his wife, and out of respect for where we'd come from. So there you have it. I still had some honor left.

"McDougal," I said.

"Johnson," he said.

"SEALS?" I said.

"Nah. Rangers."

And that was that. We went inside to a large comfortable living room with a high ceiling, a big picture window overlooking the street, a lot of white furniture and cherry wood, and even a baby grand piano next to a marble fireplace big enough to park a Volkswagen in. A wall niche sported a statue of the Virgin Mary, in front of which was one of those candles in the glass jars. The couch underneath the window probably cost ten grand, had a lot of gold brocade woven through the white satin covering, but for all its external worth gave out a loud interior cracking sound and sagged heavily when I sat down.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't worry about it," Johnson said, making no issue of my size and weight, or the fact I'd just ruined his furniture. "It always does that."

"You Catholic?" I said, pointing to the statue.

"Mostly by necessity," he said. "They're the only ones who have a ritual for actually removing the stink of sin from the soul."

"You mean confession?"

"Yeh. It's like taking your soul to the dry cleaners. And between you and me, I still have a lot of dry cleaning to do."

"The Catholic Church is full of perverts," I said.

"Yeh, but the perverts inside the church aren't Catholics," he said. "They're infiltrators. You remember what in infiltrator is, don't you?" Johnson focused a gimlet eye on me.

I remembered.

"What's an infiltrator?" Angela asked.

"An infiltrator," I explained, "is someone who makes it past the wire and sticks his bayonet in your eye while you're sleeping."

"Except in the church," Johnson added, "the infiltrators in high places used their pricks as bayonets to stick our Catholic children. But we're cleaning them out as we speak."

Our eyes met again and we exchanged silent recognition of who we were and where we'd been. And he was right about having too many sins. We had accumulated an unforgivable number of them in Southeast Asia. It had a new kind of enemy in Vietnam, an enemy who relied on stealth and savagery instead of strength and numbers, and the powers that be in the American military machine had decreed that a new kind of soldier would be needed. So they created men like Johnson and myself. Men who would swim through snake infested rivers at night, find enemy boats and blow everybody in the boats to hell. Men who could take a Ka-bar knife in each hand and wreak a carnage that would gag a butcher. Johnson and I were just such men.

Our superiors saw to it that we were poked and prodded and subjected to every known form of psychological torture. We were taught to kill without thinking. To destroy people by whatever means was most expedient. Sometimes we vaporized them, sometimes we showered them with white hot flying needles, sometimes we gutted them and left them hanging on a gatepost in their village as a lesson to the others. Many times we killed every man, woman and child in the village. And could still recall each expiring soul with a frightening clarity.

### Chapter 4

A half hour later, we were on our second shaker of pretty good rum sours, consumed with a decent bowl of bridge mix, which even had the small malted milk balls in it, a 40-gallon sack of which, Johnson informed me, he had purchased at Costco and kept in his spare freezer somewhere below us in a combination basement and game room. We had exchanged more than a few war stories and were now sufficiently lubricated for the reason of my visit to be discussed.

"I think I'll just get right to it," Johnson said, looking at me. "I'm not going to ask Angela not to listen to all this, or get into a big thing about who you are, or why Angela wants you in the picture. I'm just going to tell you that a guy I know over in Ramparts Division says it was Lenny Poon who killed David."

"Well, that's something he definitely shouldn't ought a have done," I said. "And what the hell kind of name is Lenny Poon?"

"Yeh, well, the thing is, Lenny Poon isn't his real name. His real name is Leonid Pontraskaya."

"Good God," I said. "The Russian drug dealer."

"Yes. But most people know him as the politically powerful former cold war era KGB asshole now turned Ambassador of good will."

"He's a low-life puke who floods the ghetto with H."

"Ah. You know of him?"

"I got a neighbor," I said, "who does a little small time dealing who mentioned him to me once. But the real question is, why would a heavyweight like Lenny Poon shoot David? I'm assuming he didn't personally do it, but rather one of his crew for some reason or other."

"Yeh. My man told me the store camera caught the whole thing. They got a full-face of the guy who pulled the trigger, but they don't know his true identity. All they know is that he's a new guy who's only been in the area for a few months. Goes by the street name of Nose."

"Because he's a coke addict?" I asked.

"No. On account of he has a huge schnoz. Some kind of deformity. His nose is about five times that of normal."

"Let me guess. Nobody can find Nose."

"That's right."

"Johnson?" Angela said. "Why didn't you tell me this before? This doesn't sound like just a liquor store robbery gone wrong. And the police have a tape of my son being murdered? Why wasn't I allowed to see it?"

"Aw, Angela," Johnson said, "you don't wanna see that. You should be taking it easy."

"No," Angela said. "Because it's not going to be easy. It's going to be hard. Very hard from here on out. I lost a child by miscarriage three years ago, and I lost a husband recently to a heart attack, and now I've lost my only son to a cheap-ass murdering snake. So hard is what I have, and I've accepted that. Hard it is and hard it shall be."

The room took on a bit of afternoon gloom, perhaps because the window faced east, or perhaps partly due to a scattering of clouds blown in from the Pacific, or maybe because life itself had been diminished an additional fraction by the evil we were immersed in.

"So where is Lenny Poon," I said.

"Well, that's the hell of it," Johnson said. "He lives right down the street from Angela. About five blocks north of Sunset. In an actual castle that was brought over here stone by stone by some shipping guy in the Twenties."

Angela looked about the room, her eyes seeing nothing, her vision obscured by the raging flames of some internal hellfire. "The man who killed my son ... is my neighbor? And he lives in a castle just up the street?" This was stated flatly, as though she had just enough breath left in her body to form the words and nothing more.

Johnson heaved a big sigh, and seemed to shrink a few inches further into his overstuffed chair. He looked at me with anger, and yet in his eyes I detected an uncertainty, as though he'd willingly crossed a bridge he now knew he shouldn't have.

"It's okay, Johnson" I said.

"I struggled about giving you the information," Johnson said. "I--"

"--you're a good cop," I said.

"Used to be," he said. "I'm retired. I'm nothing now. Just an old fat guy on a pension, waiting for the Medicare to kick in. If this keeps up, I'll be forced into a motor home and a continual purgatory of traveling from one casino to another."

"No. You'll always be a cop. And I can tell you were a mean bastard. I'm glad we never met before. I would have had to blow us both up."

"McDougal, I think you should let the police handle this thing. I've still got some contacts, and I think I can keep the pressure up."

"I'm not stopping the police," I said. "But if I find the killer first ... " My words hung in the air. "Look, Johnson," I said. "Billy saved my life in Cambodia. He asked me to intervene. What else can I do?"

"You can quit living in the jungle and let the powers that be handle it."

"I am the power," I said. "Not to mention the glory." I stood up and looked at them both. "I've got to be going now. I won't be contacting either one of you again. Don't get up. I'll let myself out."

"That's it?" Johnson said.

"That's it."

"Hey!" Angela yelled. "You said I could go with you."

"I lied. You stay here with Johnson. Maybe the two of you can say a prayer to the Virgin for me." I was halfway out the front door when Johnson called out.

"McDougal, what would you say if I told you I'm sick and tired of being retired," he said.

I should have kept right on going out that door. But every now and then I go soft in the head. Of course, I always regret it later, but nobody can be completely heartless every minute of every day, though God knew I tried. I knew what Johnson was asking of me. He was asking for the privilege of serving under my command, possibly even dying under it, covered in glory, reserving for other old timers the obscene fate of dying alone from the grotesque, bloated inefficiency of natural causes.

"Can your dog still fight?"

"Hell yes!"

"Does your dog have a name?"

"Heinz."

"Then pack your bag and put a leash on Heinz and let's go."

"I'm going too," Angela said, speech slurred, rising a bit unsteadily to her feet. "I'm going with you so I can cut Lenny Poon's head off with the Bowie knife."

I thought about this, but only for a second before nodding my head in assent. Hey, why not? Life is meant to be lived. Angela's soul had died along with her son. Perhaps cutting Lenny Poon's head off would be just the thing to effect some sort of temporal resurrection within her. It wasn't for me to say one way or the other. I am but something made of dust, and to dust I would soon be returning. Not to discount the stuff. Not by any means. There's a lot more dust in the universe than anything else. So I waited for them to join me, and inside of ten minutes we were crammed into the roadster, Angela beside me and Johnson and the dog crushed into the back, on our way down the hill to a fate assuredly not reserved for those who were currently traversing the slower, safer, narrower route to High Heaven.

### Chapter 5

"We're just going to do a little recon," I said to them both as we approached our first area of potential operations. "Just to get the feel."

We pulled up opposite Lenny Poon's castle, which wasn't visible from the street, owing to a higher than usual concrete wall, a solid, no-peeking gate made of iron and oak which cost more than most ordinary people's houses, and the presence of towering pines and other foliage which suggested that perhaps somewhere beyond the wall, something evil lurked which the primitives had put up the wall to contain. While we sat watching the place, the gate began to retract, and I could see beyond it a set of retractable steel posts set into the driveway. The setup was designed to let a vehicle enter the first gate, but not progress further until after an inspection of sorts, after which the further retractable steel posts were lowered. Heavy security, of the kind which suggested an assault by armored infantry were imminent owing to some breach of law or contract which threatened too damn many people in too many high, or low places, depending on the merchandise or services in question. Lenny Poon had a lot of enemies by the look of things. Perhaps because he hired thugs with big noses from Novo Sibirsk to assassinate people's children.

"A fortress," Johnson said. "No way we're going to get in there."

"Heinz has terrible breath," I said, feeling no need to discuss the obvious implications of the heavy security presented by Lenny Poon. "Don't you know they sell those doggy breath mints?"

"Open a window," Johnson said.

I did better than that. I hit the one button mechanism that opened the top. The whole thing folded neatly into the boot behind Johnson's seat. A multi-bloomed magnolia tree in the easement dappled the light across our faces. I slipped on a pair of Ray Bans. There's just nothing like a convertible on a sunny Southern California day.

"McDougal," Johnson said. "There's something I forgot to tell you. One little detail which may affect our plans just a tad. I saw on CNN this morning that Poon is having a visitor this week."

"Who?"

"Just a certain famous person who's going to be speaking at USC this Saturday at some sort of New Age thing."

"Which famous person?"

"Gorbachev."

"Are you kidding me? This guy's hosting Gorbachev this weekend?"

"Yeh. He's going to share with select intimates how to take over the world or something."

The gate was now fully retracted. Would we get a glimpse of the Gorbachev motorcade emerging? One thing was very clear. I wasn't on Granny's farm anymore. Being a lonely man, and one of an age to spend time reminiscing over better days gone by, I thought of Granny. She'd raised me from infancy on the family farm just outside Memphis. As I sat there, waiting to possibly get a glimpse of Gorby, I wondered what she would have thought of the man I'd become.

She'd raised me to respect God, family, hard work, and the absolute moral truths by which she was certain God ran the universe and every living thing within it. But falsely accused, convicted and imprisoned for ten years in a steel room had stripped me of most of my early formation, and left in its stead something more in line with the values held, say, by the average Great White on a day when the feeding grounds haven't quite filled the demands of its insatiable belly.

"Do you guys think Gorbachev's the antichrist?" Angela said.

"Today," Johnson said, "I'm the antichrist. At least as far as Lenny Poon's concerned."

I sighed, wondering what I was doing with these two people. I'd become something twisted, a creature as hard as the iron walls which had been my torment. Still and all, it was at times like these that I remembered Granny, as though she was calling to me from a better place, telling me that I still had time to avail myself of the mercy which stilled flowed throughout the earth for those such as I.

"What are you frowning about, John?" Angela said. "You look like you just saw a ghost."

"I was just wondering what my Granny would think if she could see me now," I said. "She--"

"--Someone's coming," Johnson said. He fished around in a large gym bag he'd brought for the occasion, producing a sawed off Remington.

"Put that thing away. We're just here to observe," I said.

"Observe my ass," Johnson said.

"Put it away. What if Gorbachev's coming out? There'll be a half-dozen guys armed to the teeth. They'll probably have an armed attack chopper overhead. And the last thing we need is for you to start blasting away with a shotgun and get ourselves ground into hamburger from above by some fanatic with a mini-gun."

Johnson guffawed heavily, and sprayed slightly the back of my neck. Yes, real men still guffaw, and he didn't cover his mouth when he did it. I glanced his way in the rearview mirror, where he sat cheek to cheek with Heinz, the both of them exposing a great many teeth, of which it could be said the dog's were the more numerous, and in better condition than the man's.

"That's it," I said. "I'm taking you both home. It was a mistake to let either of you come with me. Somebody is probably watching us from somewhere in there right now, taking down our plate, or snapping pictures. Johnson, you're a cop. An honest man. What you should do is stay that way. Go back home to your rich wife. And I want you to take Angela in for a few days until I'm done with my work."

"I'm staying," he said.

"No," I said. "Your cop reflexes will get in the way when it's time to do the killing. Deep down inside you there's a moral component you won't be able to break. Don't feel bad. It doesn't make you less of a man or anything. It's just that not many men in this world have the stones to do what I'm about to do."

"We'll take Angela back to my place," Johnson said, "and then the two of us can continue our reconnaissance."

"We're all staying," Angela said softly. She was on the verge of passing out, her head resting back, eyes half closed. "I don't care if they kill me."

I cared if they killed her. Because every time I looked at her I felt something down deep inside me I'd long thought dead. No, I'd never have such a woman, but her presence in my life was a saving grace anyway. "You're drunk, Angela," I said, putting the car in gear. But before I could swing away from the curb, a van approached from the north.

"Someone's coming in," I said. A white delivery van, nondescript and unmarked. The van obviously had advance communication powers to the gatekeepers, who had opened the gate, another security measure designed to prevent the van from an overly long stop in the street, where it would be vulnerable to who knew what manner of predatory thing.

The van, which was being driven by a tiny woman, pulled inside the first gate and lo and behold, coming out to meet the van, to usher it safely into port, was a squat, heavyset man with a huge beak. It had to be none other than the triggerman who shot David. Who, because he had such a huge proboscis had been nicknamed Nose by the local cops.

"There is a God," I said, "and there is justice in the world."

Nose, not realizing he was God's gift to us, instead appeared to be an aggressive bastard, immediately trotting toward us, waiving one arm as though warding off an evil spell, while at the same time reaching beneath his coat.

"Damn," Johnson said. "I put my shotgun back in the bag and now the zipper's stuck!"

There was an obscene, grunting command from Johnson and Heinz sprung from the car with an incredible swiftness and savagery. Nose stood stock-still, possibly from the fear of having his gun arm torn off at the joint by the fast-closing and very ugly canine. Which gave me a couple of extra seconds during which I pulled out my Colt Commander, and popped off an ear-smoking round, catching Nose through the back of his left thigh. It was a cheap snap shot, way off center body mass, but he'd smartly turned and ducked when he saw my piece come up. He'd intended to duck and roll, to gain some safety behind the side of the van opposite us, but the bullet must have struck bone, the hydrostatic shock dropping him like a rag doll. At which point the frightened driver of the van, trying to escape the trap, and frightened by the gunshot, backed over the wounded man's leg. We could hear the crack of bone and Nose's simultaneous scream from where we sat. The driver lacked the nerve to back up any further, her basic instinct about such things tending towards mercy and goodness.

### Chapter 6

I eased our vehicle away from the curb and blocked the van's escape entirely. A small woman of Philippine or maybe Chinese extraction, wearing a smart uniform, blue with red piping, with the name of some school on it, slowly got out.

"Walk away," Johnson said, climbing out of the jump seat. "Just walk down the sidewalk and disappear." And she did, not looking back.

I got out of the Mercedes and walked up to the van, stepping across the fallen, unconscious Nose, and pulled open the rear doors, Johnson at the ready with his backup pistol should perchance there be a small phalanx of ne'er do wells hiding inside, intent on gaining a surprise advantage. It was not to be, instead there was a skinny blond kid inside, in a wheelchair, the heavy, motorized kind, pointing a small pistol at me, a revolver. He'd made a huge mistake, the revolver's chamber having one bullet missing, which would cause the hammer to fall on an empty chamber at the initial trigger pull.

"Don't even think about firing that thing," I said to him.

"School's out," Johnson said. "This must be his kid. I heard Lenny Poon's got a teenage boy who's a cripple. Goes to some high class private school."

Behind me I heard a sound. And saw the ugly sight of Angela lying atop the downed murderer, Nose, her index and middle fingers rammed straight into the man's nostrils. The right nostril tore open, spurting blood, and she began to wretch all over his face.

"Johnson, do something about that, willya?" He went to help her, pulling her off the victim, who'd passed out from the pain. I turned my attentions back to the kid with the pea shooter. Our eyes met and the kid saw something reflected back at him from my watery blue shark's pupils few men live to recount. In life or death confrontations, it always comes down to the eyes, and in his, I could clearly see he hadn't the will to do what needed to be done. His gun hand began to shake uncontrollably. This could not be held against him, for he was nothing more than a callow young man, one who'd been denied the use of his legs, and who'd had a lot of coaching from people who'd taught him that, if you were a cripple, that you were a winner anyway, and you could compete in your own Olympics and be admired from afar by the likes of Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. Never mind that most paraplegics wound up on disability, living in rat holes just like the one I inhabited until they died early from the heartbreak.

"Hey kid," I said. "You're not supposed to take a gun to school. You could get expelled."

"It's a private school. All the kids have something. You have to have something when you're rich."

What he meant was, when you're crippled.

"What's your name," I said.

"Gregor."

"Figures. Will you come with us, Gregor? It'll only be for a little while."

He nodded. "I will, but if you were smart you'd leave me alone. My father won't give you money. Instead, he will kill you. He already knows who you are. The cameras at the gate have recorded everything. And I'm not afraid of you. I didn't shoot you because your friend has the shotgun. Otherwise I would have. But my father will find you and then you'll realize you've made a big mistake."

"I make lots of mistakes, kid. It's no big deal. Now give me that." I took the gun from the kid, and his school bag, which had a cell phone that I stomped on the pavement, and loaded the still-unconscious Nose into the van.

"Johnson, I'll drive the van, and you take Angela back to your place in her car." From somewhere beyond the trees, deep within the compound, I could hear dogs barking and men shouting. Security had been alerted. We had but seconds more to make a graceful exit. I put the van into gear and headed south for Sunset. Johnson ignored my directions to take Angela home, following behind me instead. So much for him being under my command.

We hit Sunset and five minutes later were traveling within the speed limit on the 101 south to downtown L.A, a ride which gives one the feeling of traveling down a filthy concrete digestive tract into the lower bowels of a putrid city, the place known as East Los Angeles, where all the poor people strive mightily with one another for ill-gotten gains that profit nobody.

I turned off on Alameda, looped around through the stinking gray world of L.A.'s backside, and took the back way to my place, the ten story brick apartment house across the street from the Greyhound station. The station was up to its usual self, that of belching thick clouds of diesel exhaust and dispatching the big shabby buses with the lice infested seats and filthy bathrooms, the better with which to transport the drunks, druggies, farm workers, little old ladies, traveling foreigners, perverts and parolees to their various sordid and sundry destinations.

The apartment block was surrounded by cold storage buildings, mostly secured by high chain link fences, mean dogs and razor wire. The buildings were doubtless filled with apples, or iced broccoli, or crack cocaine, or other products which come from the soil, what with my neighborhood being smack dab in the middle of the Los Angeles Produce Market, perhaps one of the largest in the world, it being the entry point for the fruits and vegetables and drugs necessary to keep sixteen million hungry bodies marching and munching and dreaming their way through the illusive purgatory sometimes referred to as La-La land.

Pulling into the crowded, obscenely graffiti'd alleyway behind my building, I found a convenient parking spot between a couple of dumpsters and a pile of old mattresses. I noticed they'd come and picked up the body of Billy , which I'd dumped out my window earlier, but picking him up was all they'd done, there was no police tape, or other evidence anybody gave much of a damn about how he'd gotten there. I was surprised they'd come and taken him away so fast, the alleyway normally being a place nobody in their right mind would even think of looking. Maybe a junkie had phoned it in, hoping the cops would tip him a few bucks. Johnson pulled up behind me in the Mercedes.

I took out the big Bowie and punched the blade into the sidewall of the two front tires of the van.

"What're you doing?" Johnson asked.

"To discourage anyone who tries to steal it," I said.

"So you're just going to leave that thing sitting in the alley with two flat tires. That's ridiculous, McDougal. You shouldn't be parking it here in the first place. I've never heard of a thief parking a stolen vehicle next door to his home."

"I'm not a thief. And what difference does it make if I park it beneath my apartment? There's thirty units in this building. No way to connect this van to me." I gestured at the Mercedes, which, in the filthy underbelly of this back alley, looked like an alien spacecraft. "Park that across the street in the Greyhound lot," I said. "And pay the lot man extra to guard it. And also threaten to kill him if anything happens to it or he'll call his friends and it'll get stripped clean while he looks the other way."

Johnson left me alone and I got down to business. Nose was lying in a puddle of blood, the huge nostrils thick with clotting blood, his leg swollen to three times normal size, laboring to breathe through his mouth. He wasn't going anywhere but into shock. I was going to have to deal with Nose, to collect from him the retribution demanded by his action of executing Billy Q's son David. I was going to punish him, but I wanted to transport him to a place I knew of in the tunnels underneath Union Station. A place where I could extract a whole lot of information from him about the coming and going of Lenny Poon. Then I would exact the maximum retribution possible, and he would die slowly underneath the ground, in a place where the screams of a human being in mortal agony were generally ignored by anybody inhabiting the place. That would be later, under cover of darkness.

Meanwhile, I took the hypo kit from my bag and shot Nose up with enough morphine to keep him out for a few hours. Then I grabbed the kid out of his expensive motorized chair and carried him in the back way. The kid, to his credit, had not thrown up. Perhaps his life in a wheelchair had rendered him a lot tougher than I first thought. A few minutes more after that, I was cursing the elevator in my building for it's unfaithfulness, which forced me to carry the kid the final three flights to my apartment, where what was in store for him I knew, but he could only guess.

There was a knock on my door and Johnson and Angela walked in.

"Where's Heinz?"

"I put him in the van to guard our prisoner," he said. Johnson grabbed them both a Bud Light from the fridge before escorting her to a position on the big red leather couch with the spread over it. Angela was sitting on top of the blood of her son's father. I declined to point out this fact to her. Johnson tuned in a local channel, the Lakers in early season, somebody missing a second free throw and getting paid about ten thousand dollars a minute to do it on National TV.

"McDougal, I been thinking," Johnson said. "I think we're maybe making a big mistake, here. We've done good so far. By good old fashioned dumb luck, we've caught the murderer. You should let the police handle it now. Turn the killer over to them. And we should let the kid go. That was not a good idea, kidnapping the kid. We should have left him there."

"Go home, Johnson," I said, taking the kid into the bathroom and laying him out in the tub before pulling out the Bowie knife, at the sight of which, his eyes widened considerably. They were hazel-gold, the kind only the Russian people sport, and with his long, shag-cut blond hair, he reminded me of one of those famous Olympic figure skaters whose name I cannot remember. It was the one who skated the best in '02 but for some reason came in second.  
"Angela," I called.

She left the living room and came and stood next to me, and I handed her the knife.

"What's this for?"

I nodded at the boy. "Tit for tat," I said.

The comprehension came slow, filtered as it was through the drugs and the rum sours and the grief. "You want me to execute this boy. You can't mean it."

I didn't mean it. I was offering her the knife as a mercy. She would not be able to cut the boy's head off and she would understand that in spite of her grief, she was still a decent human being. This knowledge would help her to fare with some dignity in the lousy months and years to come. So I offered her the knife, knowing she would, by it's presence, rediscover the good within herself.

"I can't ... kill a child," she said. "But I think I can kill the man with the large nose. I think I can do that. Take me down to the van and I'll do it."

"This is better," I said. "This is Lenny Poon's son. Lenny Poon took your son. Now you take his. Case closed."

"You ... you're evil. I had no idea how much so, until this very moment. You really did strangle an old woman in Vietnam, didn't you? I ... I thought we just took the kid to lure Lenny Poon out of his fortress. To interrogate him or something."

"No. We took the kid to kill him. To get revenge for your son. I'll go back to the fortress later and take Poon out."

"You will? But how?"

I did not share my plan with her. But it involved blowing the entire place to hell, flying over it by night and dropping onto the castle roof something that exploded in such a way as to leave no stone standing upon itself and no living thing in its wake for a good two hundred yards in any direction. Something I could make myself from readily available materials purchasable anywhere in America.

No, you're not safe, no matter what the Director of Homeland Security tells you. Sorry, but the cat's already out of the bag, and every demented psycho knows it. Don't bother to curl into a ball when it comes. It'll just cause the heat to weld your teeth to your knees.

Johnson stuck his head in the bathroom door. "What're you doing with the kid? You're not seriously thinking of killing the kid, are you?"

I looked at him. "Not me," I said. "Angela's going to do it."

"The hell she is," Johnson said.

"Hey look," I said, turning to the man. "I didn't ask you to come. You asked me. What? What did you expect to find? What did you expect?"

Johnson stood, jaw clenched, his body trembling with anger. "Aw shit, McDougal, we're not back in the jungle anymore."

"Tell that to somebody who gives a damn. Go home, Johnson. I knew you'd wash out halfway through this thing. You're no Ranger. You're nothing but regular Army pussy."

"Not. I got the purple heart to prove it."

"Which you got when you cut yourself shaving. Or was it a paper cut, you rear echelon pogue."

Johnson walked very slowly to the door, his every fiber straining to get at me, but his common sense holding him back. "Angela? You coming?"

"No. Go home, Johnson, like the man says."

"Angela. Let's go."

"I'm not leaving," she said. "Perhaps John is right. Maybe we should get revenge. An eye for an eye."

"I'm getting out of here," Johnson said, and left.

"What's going on?" Gregor said. "Why are you talking crazy?"

"What's going on is, this woman here, is going to cut your head off sometime in the next couple of minutes. After which, we're going to dismember you and stuff your component parts into garbage bags and toss your remains into the ocean somewhere off the San Pedro breakwater. You're crab food, kid. Say your prayers, or whatever it is you do, and say them fast, because you're checking out."

"But why?" he said.

"Because your father, Lenny Poon, killed her son. He had the guy with the big nose kill her kid. So we're going to kill you. It's called retribution, kid."

"Hail Mary, full of grace," Gregor said, before turning his face to the wall and whispering the rest, over and over again.

Okay, maybe I should have been more sensitive. We're not supposed to speak to our young people this way. Maybe Angela was right. I was evil. I was picking on a cripple, after all. I did feel a twinge somewhere down deep, in the place where my Granny had written upon my childhood heart the laws of her God. But merely a twinge. I'd made a promise to Billy Ahiga. I'd promised him retribution. I'd promised Billy that I'd find the killer of his son and blot out that killer, and his entire family, from among the generations of the earth. In short, that the seed of Lenny Poon would be cut off, forever, from the land of the living. But something was bothering me. Something simply didn't feel right. Then I heard it. A voice, soft and warm, like the feel of a spring breeze.

My son, the voice said. Granny's voice. Speaking clearly to me from wherever she was, from across the fathomless, eternal spaces where she no doubt slopped a better sort of hog than the ones she had truck with here on earth.

"Did you hear that?" I said. "Did you hear that voice? It was my Granny. She just spoke to me."

"McDougal, you're cracked," Angela said. "You're a complete wacko. You make Charlie Manson look like a boy scout. But I've come to realize that the rules have changed for me as well. I should be repulsed, but since they killed my son, there's something going on inside of me. Something hard, and ugly."

"I've changed my mind," I said. "I just heard a voice from beyond the grave. I don't think we should kill this kid."

"No!" Angela cried. "No, this thing has to be done. Don't you get it, McDougal? What Billy was trying to say? They killed our only son! This isn't something you settle in court. This is something you must take care of yourself. The blood of my son is crying to me from the ground! This thing has to be done ..." She took the knife uncertainly in her shaking hands, holding it all wrong, and got on her knees beside the kid in the tub. There was a silence, and she gave the kid a tentative poke on the neck. I reached out to stop her. Unfortunately, the kid jerked at the touch of cold steel and the razor sharp blade sliced cleanly into his jugular, which began to spurt. As though awakening from a dream, Angela took in the full horror of what she had done.

"God! John! I've cut him! Oh! Look at all the blood! Jesus, do something!"

### Chapter 7

The kid was squealing. I took the knife away from Angela. It was time to finish him off, but I hesitated. My head was screaming. I don't know why I felt so wrong about the killing of the kid. Maybe because I figured retribution didn't really apply to the kid. Billy hadn't known that Lenny Poon's son was a cripple, and in fact wouldn't be reproducing any more of the father's line. Or maybe I had a feeling Granny wouldn't approve. I'd heard her voice, calling me, touching me with it's softness, it's love. By it's very ethereal beauty, I had become aware that I, in comparison to that kind of purity, had reached a new low. Something even lower than the time I burned an entire family to death by throwing them in a pit and dousing them with fuel oil after the father tossed a grenade and killed three friends of mine. This was lower than that because this time, I had nearly lost the last small piece of my soul.

I'd nearly executed a crippled boy. Perhaps had I been acting alone, perhaps if my own son had been murdered, I could have done it, could have worked up the killing heat within myself to finish the kid off, but after hearing my Granny's voice, and seeing the shock in Angela's face at the sight of Gregor's spurting blood , I knew I'd lost my will. I quickly applied pressure to the wound. The spurting stopped, and I knew the kid would survive. The artery had been merely nicked, but enough blood had passed in the fifteen seconds to knock the kid cold. It took me a few minutes to get enough toughskin applied as a bandage from my medical kit and get the kid squared away. Toughskin is always the answer for ugly wounds when you don't want to mess with a needle and thread. I carried him out to the couch and laid him out. One thing was sure--there'd be no orange juice and cookies awaiting him after his self-donation of blood. There would only be the interior agony one feels when finding oneself at the farther end of Hell's hallway.

The front door opened with a bang. Johnson, Heinz at his side, the ugly beast giving me a super stink eye. The cat bolted through the window and onto the fire escape. "Nice work, you sick ghoul," Johnson said. "Well at least you didn't kill the kid. I'm taking Angela out of here. If you try to stop me, I'll turn the dog loose, and I don't care how big you are, this dog will rip your liver out. McDougal, you're doing everything all wrong. In fact, I don't think you know what you're doing. You're demented. And that thing with the Bowie knife was sick. I mean, sure I've seen some sick things and I've done a few sick things in the line of duty over the years, but this was ... well this was beyond criminal. You had no right to put that thing in Angela's hands. Not considering the condition she's in. You need help, man. A lot of help."

"You're right."

"What?"

"You're right. I just now almost did something I could never be forgiven for. Not in this life and not in the next. Don't you see, Johnson? That's why my Granny spoke to me. That's why she showed me that I was down to the last piece of my soul."

"Man, you are sicker than sick. Nobody spoke to you. You've gone over the edge. You've become schizoid. You've crossed the line, and when you did, you made an enemy of one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles. And now they're going to hunt you and take you down. Lenny Poon has citywide connections. Every junkie in town is going to be looking to finger you for the reward money. Every cop in this city is going to come down on your sorry head."

"Doesn't matter. I won't let anybody arrest me. They'll have to take me out the hard way. Which is why I think you should take Angela and disappear. Because you don't have the edge anymore. When they come for me, I intend to fight to the death. But you can't make that claim. It's because you have something to live for. You have a wife and dog. You have position in the community. You can have beers with the guys after a round of unspeakably bad golf. You can go to class reunions and laugh about the glory days. I, on the other hand, have nothing left but a vicious cat who only uses me for food and shelter."

"McDougal, let me take the kid out of here. I'll call my friends at Ramparts and tell them to pick up the thug in the van. I'll tell them the whole thing was done by some irate dealer. I won't connect you to any of it."

"No," I said. "I'll clean up my own mess. I'll return the kid. But don't plan on seeing Nose again. He's already had his trial and conviction. I just have to carry out the sentence, which is death by torture."

"You know, it's funny," Johnson said. "For awhile, when we were back at my place, you got to me. It's like I came under your spell or something. I began remembering what it was like back in that jungle all those years ago. And then I started thinking about my life with the LAPD, about all the punks I arrested over the past thirty years, punks who lawyered up and plea bargained themselves right back onto the street. I began believing you had found a better way, a cleaner way to see justice served. I ... I thought I still had the stones for a little extralegal justice. But I don't." He grabbed Angela by the wrist and took one last long look at me as he opened the door. "McDougal, just between you and me, because at some level we're brothers ... I never met you. You don't exist. Now do like Dr. Laura says. Go and do the right thing."

When the door closed behind them, I felt utterly alone. Except I wasn't. Homicide came in through the open kitchen window, neck hairs raised in irritation at the fact I'd let a large dog into his sanctuary. He jumped to the floor and glared up at me from beside the empty food dish. So I wasn't alone. And also, I had the kid. His eyes opened and he was dully aware that it wasn't a bad dream from which he'd awakened.

"I heard voices," he said. "I thought I was hearing angels. But I'm still here. You didn't kill me." He touched his neck, his fingers delicately palpating the lumps of the toughskin.

"You were saved by my Granny," I said. "She's up there in Heaven. She didn't like what I was doing and she intervened."

"Unh," he replied, having no words to describe the joy he was no doubt feeling from this salvific teleological development as regarded his present continuing form of existence in the physical plane.

Having also no words, but rather being a creature of purity and action, Homicide came over and jumped on the kid's chest, sniffing delicately at the blood. The kid reached out weakly and scratched him behind the ears.

There was a bonding thing happening between them. I could sense it, and I knew why. It had something to do with new life, and starting over. A celebration of sorts was in order. I had a couple of hours before the heat came down on my place like a bad cold. I'd blow an hour with the kid, arrange for his return to the castle in Beverly Hills, and disappear.

"Hey kid, you feel like a Big Mac?"

He nodded weakly.

"Sit tight. I'll be back in twenty minutes."

The best celebrations begin with food. I smiled at myself in my wisdom as I headed for the elevator to make the short trek to the corner McDonald's. I was through killing. Billy would simply have to wait for his retribution. And what difference did it make? Sooner or later, we all died, the only question was by what manner.

I felt a lightness inside that I hadn't felt since I was a kid. It was all so simple. From now on, I'd do it Granny's way. It would be God, the Bible, and church on Sundays. All I had to do was disappear after I'd arranged for the kid's return to his father. I'd even forget about killing Nose. And why not? Sooner or later somebody would kill Nose. No reason it had to be me. The grand plan of the universe had begun to unfold before me. I was but a grain of sand on an infinite beach. I had to stop fighting my destiny, stop defending myself, stop living up to a code of honor that no longer applied to the century I lived in. A grain of sand didn't need to defend anything. It just needed to blend in with the other grains of sand and finish out its days unnoticed by anyone or anything. Like Jesus said. Be meek and later on, inherit the earth.

### Chapter 8

Lenny Poon would file no kidnap complaint. Of course, he'd file no complaint because he'd want to deliver the justice to my sorry carcass himself. He'd come for me, but by the time he did, I'd be long gone. I still had the twenty thousand dollars Angela had given me, enough to buy a bus ticket for Memphis. They had a bus that went all the way there on its way to Miami. I wouldn't have to change anyplace along the line. I'd buy a half dozen tickets and take over the entire rear section, stay stoned on pepper vodka and ride day and night until I was back in a simpler world, a world of mercy and kindness, a world of summer thunderstorms, lightning bugs, toads croaking, and old men telling tall tales to their grandchildren on porches and stoops on soft summer evenings.

I had started out as a simple country boy and they'd turned me into a killer. When I'd done my job, they threw me in prison, a sacrifice to a Congressman's anger. But I could go back to my former world, the world they tried to take from me in that prison cell so long ago. I was going home. But first, before all of that, we would celebrate, the kid and I, and share a meal. We would commemorate the new life that had been thrust upon us. He would be celebrating his recent escape from death, and I would be celebrating a return to a life I had thought was long lost to me.

Maybe later in the evening, before I shipped myself East, I would even drop by the Rescue Mission and enjoy a round of Amazing Grace with the boys. But for the moment, a meal was required. Such a commemoration would be aptly served by a burger and fries. After all, it's best to start with the basics.

Upon my return from Mickey D's I observed my elevator was still broken, but for some reason, it managed to carry me a couple of floors higher than before, leaving me only one staircase to climb. Why the elevator did so, I could only guess. Maybe it was something to do with the cable unwinding, or tangling. Maybe it had completely unwound, thus allowing me the extra two floors as a last gesture of its mercy before it plummeted straight to the bottom on the very next ride.

Problem. Gregor was dead. He must have tried to escape or something when I left him alone. He'd crawled off the couch and dragged himself into the rear bedroom, probably searching for a telephone. Had no way of knowing I didn't use them and didn't have one. The exertion stressed his nicked artery and it must have opened back up, judging by the size of his neck. The toughskin we'd put on his neck had held tight, so the blood had forced it's way out of his eyes and ears, after blowing up his neck like a balloon. Homicide sat in the doorway to the bedroom, an ugly look on his furry visage. He was a cat, and cats don't like death. They understand what it means better than most of us.

It took me a second to comprehend it, to fully grasp that I had, in spite of my best intentions, managed do dispatch yet one more sorry soul into the void. I walked away and sat down on the couch and stared at the suffocating room around me.

I was damned. There comes a moment when the state of the soul is fully assessed, displayed without sentiment, under the harsh glaring light of reality. This moment, so the saints and prophets tell us, is usually realized by many at the precise moment of their death. I however, was accorded the privilege of understanding this hideous truth while still living. And the truth smelled. At the very innermost core of my being, I became fully conscious that I was nothing more than a dark, sickening stench in the nostrils of God. I knew that out there, somewhere, a very pissed off God had watched that boy die and added the sin to my personal account. And that very selfsame God had, at that moment, turned his face from me. Forever.

I can't say I wasn't warned. My Granny tried to tell me when she dragged me to hear the hellfire revival preachers who came to the white clapboard church in Somerville on those hot summer nights so long ago. My son, turn not thy feet unto violence. I had not listened.

There was little fanfare to accompany the fact that I had finally succeeded in damning myself to Hell. A ceremony of some sort seemed appropriate. So I tossed the filet of fish sandwich to the cat and unwrapped a Big Mac. Even the damned have to eat.

It was dark enough outside to transport Gregor to the alley. I wrapped him in the blanket which had been covering the couch. I took a couple of cans of Fix-A-Flat for the van's front tires and headed down. The elevator didn't kill me as I thought it might.

It's not a nice neighborhood. The sight of a huge man carrying a human sized bundle was dutifully ignored by all. For the simple reason that anyone poking their nose into anyone else's business in that part of town usually got killed after one or two pokes. The cops never got out of their cars, nor did the gang bangers in their primer gray Oldsmobiles, the bus drivers, or anyone else who had the sorry misfortune to be in the vicinity after dark. So I carried my bundle containing one dead kid to the alley. Plan was, to chauffeur him back to his point of origin along with the badly injured Nose. I figured Lenny Poon would kill Nose anyway, being as how he'd failed to protect Poon's only son.

The van was missing from the alley. Somebody'd driven it off, flat tires and all. Whoever stole it apparently did not even bother to discard it's unconscious passenger, Nose, before driving it off. I wondered what car thief, upon breaking open a typically nondescript white van in a downtown alley, simply accepted the fact that there was an unconscious, bleeding man with a broken leg lying on the floor in the back next to a motorized wheelchair. Accepted it and drove off on two flat front tires. Was this just another day at the office for the average inner city junkie? Had we finally arrived at a level of complacency with cheap violence that a bleeding, unconscious man with a broken leg swollen to three times its original size simply did not register? And was the motorized wheelchair a plus? Something the junkie felt sure he could at least get a few bucks for someplace? Perhaps a couple of hundred bucks from a shady durable medical supplies vendor?

I dumped the body of Gregor in the corner. Nobody'd bother it for awhile, it looking like any other sleeping wino who was broke and homeless, had AIDS, and might have an ice pick under the blanket, ready to jam it into the kneecap of an unwelcome stranger.

Upstairs, I opened the walk-in safe, the big Klein Mark 7, which wouldn't chip, crack, peel or fade under any circumstance short of a direct hit from a tactical nuclear warhead. I took out a few items I might need for the road, including a few extra grenades, along with an MP-5 submachine gun. The cat walked back there and meowed. He did not allow me to pet him, or talk kitty talk or any of that other cat stuff. Our only bond was food. At least the animal was honest about it. Accordingly, I sliced open a 10 pound bag of dry mix onto the floor of the bathroom. "The place is all yours," I said. "Have a nice life. Control your territory. Try not to let them cut your balls off." He ignored me completely in favor of the food. I left the kitchen window open so he could go in and out as he pleased, before adding a clean sweatshirt to the bag and heading downstairs to the Greyhound station to buy my ticket out of La-La Land.

Poon would be looking for me. And what he looked for he found. He had resources, high and low and middle. He'd have the kidnapping on film from the hidden cameras surrounding the gate and the street outside. He'd be able to access the right people and discover my identity faster than the FBI. Perhaps even now, his henchman, Nose, was awake, and paying off the junkie who stole the van in exchange for dropping the dime to Poon as to my most recent whereabouts. Poon would find me with the objective of forcing me to reveal the location of his only son, Gregor. All to no avail. Sooner or later they'd find Gregor in the alley and Lenny Poon would receive his retribution. No, I wasn't going to kill Lenny Poon with a flying bomb after all. Better he continue to live. It would hurt him more, that way, to be forced to continue life with the knowledge somebody'd trashed his only son. Live with not only the pain of the son's death, but the dishonor which came with having failed to protect him. His pain would be magnified by the basic goodness of his son. When one loses something, the pain is in proportion to the goodness of the thing. The soul of a father's only son is of infinite value. Poon's sorrow would therefore be infinite, unyielding, and the source of a rage and hatred perhaps unparalleled among L.A.'s citizenry.

### Chapter 9

I don't hide well. I'm too big and my signature appearance makes it all too easy for even the lamest of brains to instantly recognize me. Therefore, crossing the street at this point was a risk. They might be somewhere beyond the perimeter of my building waiting for that very event. I glanced around carefully. Everything seemed normal. Until I saw a guy in a red T-shirt driving a white van into the alley behind my building. I was fairly certain there would be more soldiers in the back of the van. They were coming to rescue Poon's son. Poon's men had a fix on my base camp. And they were by now finding Gregor, and telling somebody about it over his cell phone, and whoever he was telling was deciding what to do about me, who they doubtless by now knew lived just overhead on the tenth floor.

I decided to continue straight on towards the Memphis bus. The neighborhood continued it's ugly crawl through history. The ugliness was more apparent in what the neighborhood lacked than what it contained. It lacked niceness. It lacked courtesy and civility. For example, there were no Boy Scouts standing watch to warn me about the dangers of jaywalking. That's okay. Crossing the multi-lane avenue Seventh Street would be safe enough. Evening traffic in this part of town was light. Nobody was going home after work because nobody in this part of town worked. Not at straight jobs. They'd all be out later, selling dope to each other, and killing innocent shopkeepers for the contents of their cash registers, or because they were from the wrong country.

But all that aside, it seemed safe enough to cross the street. Until I started across. Before I was halfway to the opposite side, another white van screeched to the curb. There are no coincidences. Apparently Lenny Poon owned a number of identical white vans, the better to be innocuous with, my dear. It was the kind of vehicle nobody noticed, and most people assumed was delivering flowers, or boxes of auto parts, or porno films to any of the million or so cinderblock local retail distribution points available almost anywhere in the city. But I recognized it, having only recently driven one myself. They'd caught me by surprise, but for some reason they hesitated. The smart move would have been to simply speed up and run me down, stop, get out, and obliterate me with a careful placement of white-hot copper jacketed slugs, and simply drive away. Nobody would remember seeing a thing, and no citizen would follow them, or call the cops on a cell phone, or in any way connect themselves to the event of my killing in the middle of the street. Not in this part of L.A. Not on Seventh Street.

Still and all, the white van hesitated, and I began to wonder why. Inside my bag, I fingered a grenade, figuring to make them pay for that hesitation, lay them out all at once inside a blast radius so hot it would melt the steering wheel to the driver's hands after exploding a molten mess of airbag all over his torso, but something told me no. Somewhere down deep inside me, I still had a good impulse or two, one that did not want me to mistakenly kill innocents.

Because I could be wrong about the van. Not likely, but it was possible. Hell, an hour earlier, I would have lit the van up. But I'd just killed a crippled kid. I was feeling the need to punish myself, to somehow make the tiniest of down payments on the enormous sin I'd committed. So I held my peace, thinking I'd best be careful not to kill any more innocents.

Maybe the van was just a van, not a transport for a death squad. Maybe. Inside the van, I wondered what further surprises were going to be revealed in the space of the next several seconds. It could be the flat-eyed faces of Poon's death squad, or it could be a vanload of illegals heading for the Calexico bus. Perhaps in an hour or so we'd all be sitting in the back of the bus together and enjoying slow, careful sips of Tequila together. But just in case not, just in case it was a van belonging to Lenny Poon, as a backup precaution, I slipped out the MP5, ready to spray the windshield, if indeed they tried at this point to run me down.

It was not to be. Because under the iridescent, surreal glare of mercury vapor lamps, I recognized a familiar face, stretched with tension, and, beyond this face, from the jump seat of the vehicle, the profile of a large canine. Johnson. We stared at each other. I walked over. He was parked illegally, a thing cops do without giving it much thought. A Greyhound bus roared out of the rear lot toward us, upset at being blocked by the van, giving us some horn. I gave the driver a discreet look at the MP5 and the big bus swung out and around us, scurrying away like a giant mechanical rodent, leaving behind a dense cloud of unburned diesel smoke.

"It's hit the fan already," Johnson said. "There were two guys waiting for us at Angela's place."

"And?"

"She's safe," he said. "I left her at the bank with my wife. They left for my wife's sister's place at The Colony in Malibu for the duration."

"They're here, too," I said. "Some guy just drove a white van into the alley behind my place. But I imagine we've got a minute or two while he phones the boss and tells him the bad news."

He didn't mention what happened to the two men who met him at Angela's place. Neither of us had to acknowledge the fact he was now driving the van Poon's men had used to visit Angela's house. I smelled something familiar. The smell of blood mixed with other notorious bodily excretions. I peered into the back, well-lit from a streetlamp shining in through the front window. The two assassins from Angela's place were in the back. There was a lot of blood on the floor of the van, obviously none of it Johnson's, being as his shitty white shirt was stained with only the coffee and whatever greasy thing he usually ate with his coffee.

The two guys laid out in back weren't doing so hot. One of the men was missing most of his face, the other guy most of his ass. They were both surprisingly well dressed, with suits of a quality which suggested they had been sent out from the Mayor's office, expensive clothing, of a price which could make most people's mortgage payments for three months or more. But it was the patent leather boots which gave them their bent appearance. Too long and pointy for somebody who worked for the Mayor. I'm not sure what it is about drug dealers and shoes. They either wear two-hundred dollar tennis shoes or pointy half boots. Perhaps the guys with the boots have better protection from street narcos and don't have the need to wear something which allows them to run fast.

"I guess you really were a Ranger, after all. That looks like the kind of crap a Ranger would pull. What happened to the guy with no ass?"

"He was hiding behind that big clump of pampas grass by Angela's front door, but the dog got him," Johnson said. "It bought me a little time for when the other guy came at me from behind the fountain."

It was obvious why the other guy had no face. He'd received point blank a load from Johnson's sawed off shotgun. And many people don't realize this, but if a big dog gets you by the ass, he generally slices his way all the way through to your tailbone, and you'll be dead in seconds from the nerve damage, if not the extensive arterial bleeding.

"Okay," I said. "Bad news. Gregor's dead."

"You bastard. He was just a crippled kid. I knew we never should have taken him."

"Maybe you should have considered that when you pointed the shotgun at his face earlier today."

"I didn't kill him. You did. You and your stupid idea of revenge. I never signed on for killing a kid."

"I caused his death, but not directly," I said. "I didn't finish him off. In fact I was working up to returning him to his home, but he bled to death when I was out getting him a burger. He was trying to crawl to a phone and the wound reopened."

"Good God. I'm not telling Angela," he said. "It wouldn't help her to know the kid died from the stab wound at her hands."

"Another thing," I said. "Somebody stole the van with Nose still in it."

"You're a piece of work, McDougal," he said. "Does everything you touch turn to shit this fast?"

"Not anymore," I said. "I learned something from the death of that kid. I learned I just went beyond the pale of redemption. The only question for me now is, exactly what level of hell I'll be assigned at the end of time. So I'm out of this thing. I'm going to have some peace in my life for the short time I have remaining. I'm heading back to Memphis in about an hour."

"Oh no you're not," Johnson said. "This thing is exploding all over me. You're going to help me get the fire put out."

"Call your friends at Ramparts," I said. "Hell, with your thirty years on the force, surely you've got an army at your disposal."

"No," he said. "Even an army can't guard me and my wife forever. This thing won't stop growing until we tear it out at the roots."

He meant we had to kill Lenny Poon. Who was, although an evil drug dealer, also becoming well known in the higher echelon social circles, and had been seen at fund-raisers. Even had his name on a few brass donor slabs at places like the Norton Simon, and the Getty. And now, most recently, was going to feather his cap further by being Gorbachev's host.

"You'll have to disappear," I said. "Because you can't get Lenny Poon now. He's grown too big. And, like I said, you're not the kind of guy who's willing to die in the attempt."

"But you are," he said. "That's why you're not going back to Memphis. Not just yet. You're going to stay here and kill him. Or so help me, I'll put my dog on you right now."

The explosion behind me took me completely by surprise. The cracking whump of it slammed me against the side of the van. I looked back and saw chunks of the roof of my former dwelling beginning to rain down around the apartment, the top of which vented enough flames and smoke to suggest that an active volcano had just erupted underneath the building.

### Chapter 10

"You blew up your own apartment?" Johnson said, his face gaping wide in disgust.

"Hell no," I said. "A couple of hundred people live in that building." So I continued to watch the rain of debris around the building in amazement. Which was when I saw the reflected upper torsos and heads of three guys on the rooftop a couple of buildings to the east of my building. They had a long tube of some kind. They'd fired something through the window of my place, something with the approximate power of a Hellfire missile. For all I knew, it was a Hellfire. Or a LAWS rocket. No, the barrel was too long. A Chinese bazooka perhaps. The kind of thing somebody who supervised the shipments of large amounts of drugs might want to have handy, say in case it was an exchange on the open water someplace down around the Baja Peninsula. Or maybe a mile or so past the San Pedro breakwater. You went south on the deal, they burned you right there in the water.

One of the guys on the roof pointed in my direction. A spotter raised his scope. I flipped him the bird. He flipped me back. The guy with the tube bent down. Maybe to get another rocket.

"I guess I'm not heading for Memphis," I said, hurrying around to the back of the van and climbing in, Johnson squealing the tires before I could even get the doors closed, his U-turn nearly throwing me back into the street as he jumped the curb at McDonald's and found the safety of intervening structures to shield us from the rocket.

As I said before, I was damned. But apparently, Hell needed company, and I was appointed to bring a few extra souls with me.

Johnson rounded the turn onto Alameda and slowed down. Already we could hear the sirens of whatever engine company was the closest. And people were coming out of their rat hole tenements, drawn by the shockwave and the subsequent fire. They shouldn't come out. The smart ones stay inside and pray rosaries. This night, there were few smart ones.

"Kill the lights and pull into this next alleyway," I said, pointing to the one which ran past a brick-faced cold storage building.

"Naw, let's get out of here," Johnson said.

"Then drop me off," I said.

"No. You're not going to shame me with those childish tactics." He doused the lights and we entered the alley, which was deserted, and black as Erebus, save for the light from a rising February moon, combined with the flames of my old apartment, which reminded one of the glow of a campfire. I could almost taste the weenies and the marshmallows as they were eaten, half raw, half charcoal, straight from the coat hanger.

We were half a block into the alley when we saw it. The white van similar to ours was parked about where I thought it would be. The modern Russian mafia. The same guys who used to pull up in the middle of the night in Moscow and take Granny to the torture cells, where they left her wet from their piss, naked in a subzero concrete vault until she finked on all her grandchildren. Now they were here, taking drugs to Granny's grandchildren at the better schools. No black cars, no KGB tactics, no fanfare. Just white vans.

The sirens were increasing. Judging by the way the presence of our duly constituted legal authorities would be soon felt, I knew it wouldn't be long before the rooftop rocket man and his companions would be coming out to drive away and live to fight another day. But I had other plans. Johnson, not needing to be told anything, killed the engine and coasted our white van until we were about a hundred yards back of their white van. I took out the big Bowie knife.

"You'll need more than that," Johnson said, reaching down for the shotgun.

"No I won't. But I may need your driving skills to save my sorry behind. Wait here."

The alley, save for the other white van, was deserted, devoid even of sleeping winos. There weren't as many winos in the alleys as used to be in the old days. Ever since the baby gang-bangers began their initiation into the gang by hunting for derelicts and pumping nine-millimeter shells into their alcohol soaked carcasses. No, the winos had moved to higher ground, or perhaps you could say lower ground, preferring the labyrinthine accommodations of the tunnels running underneath Union Station, a place even a baby gang-banger feared to tread, lest he find himself on the wrong end of a homemade Molotov cocktail, tossed expertly and without remorse by the soberest of the lot who hung out down there.

I was always good at sneaking up on my victims and tonight was no exception. The driver, the guy in the red T-shirt, had loaded Gregor into the back of the van and was resting from this Herculean labor, smoking some brand of stinky cigarette I couldn't identify, something perhaps only Russian mafia types enjoyed, made of Cuban tobacco from the glory days of their ties with our less fortunate neighbors south of Florida.

His window was down, and he had the engine idling, perhaps thinking it might be the thing for a quick getaway, what with his friends on the roof having just fired a rocket into my apartment. I could imagine what he must be thinking. That he had a payday coming, and what he would do with the money. First, a night in a City famous for it's velvety, sinful pleasures. There would be a lot of bragging and better brands of booze and perhaps a touch of two-hit Colombian laced with crack. And a whole lot of other stuff. After which, during regular business hours, there would be a trip to a better jeweler to buy something for his young Russian wife to make up for the fact he didn't come home for a couple of nights.

I almost hated to interrupt the guy. I was sure what was going through his mind was a lot better than what was about to happen in the here and now, in the flesh. I almost hated to, but on the other hand, the guy and his friends had just fired a rocket into my apartment. Never mind that I had moved out and turned the place over to an animal. The rules were the rules. If I say a thing is forbidden in my house, then it's forbidden. I can complain about my Granny. You can't. I can explode a rocket in my apartment. You can't.

So I sneaked up the alley to the driver's side of the van. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it, the objective being to avoid the inevitable spray of blood which naturally occurs when the head is most of the way severed from the body. O.J., in spite of all the play acting he'd done in the movies, had not learned the technique, which was why forensics had found a bloody handprint on the rear gate, as well as a ton of blood in the shower drain at Brentwood, and elsewhere.

I had excellent technique, most days. But when the van driver felt my index finger rammed through his ear, and his lower jaw caught hooked by a powerful thumb which jerked his head outside the window, his cigarette flew from his mouth into my hair. I keep my hair close cropped, military style and felt the burn on my scalp instantly. I had to shake the thing off me, and by the time I did, the guy had fumbled open his door in an attempt to ram me with it, whilst at the same time, his other hand brought forth the Glock 9 he'd apparently kept hard by for precisely this situation. The guy should have been headless already, but my technique had been interfered with and moved to another plane entirely.

One must adapt or be removed from the trial and error experimentation such as life is. So I adapted, without thinking about it too much. Which is my edge. I don't think about it. I let my animal brain handle the task. That way there's no need for a second processing by the brain for the message to kill. Just in through the eyes, down to the dorsal root ganglion, and back to the necessary muscles, all at the speed of about 186,000 miles per second. The guy in the van was thinking, and going slower than I was. So when I reached through the open car door, past the guy's face and met his oncoming gun-wielding hand with a heavy upward slash of the Bowie, severing almost completely the gun hand at the wrist, the guy released a tremendous whoosh of air which nearly blew me down with the smell of garlic. He'd had a lot of it, and recently.

It's an ugly thing what a big man with a sharp knife can do. So ugly, entire juries have been known to request a recess from the room after the prosecutor shows them the photos. When I sliced through his neck clean to the rear of his spinal cord, it was an ugly thing, save for one redeeming feature. I'd decided not to sever the cord. I think it's because I know the shockwave from the severed spinal cord blacks out the brain completely. I didn't want to black him out entirely. I wanted the chemical processes in the brain to continue to function for another twelve minutes or so, giving the man's soul a chance to operate the machinery for awhile longer. I believe in giving a man a chance to come to Jesus. I want him to have that last nanosecond to think about what it all meant. I was sure he was thinking about it now.

I was also thinking, not about what it all meant, but more about the smell of blood and garlic coming off the guy, which combined scent molecules in such a way and juxtaposition as to make a lesser man puke. But I held it back. I've never been a puker, although I don't discredit the many brave men I've know who were. Maybe I'd learned not to puke from slaughtering the hogs on Granny's farm. Once you've taken in a healthy draught of hog blood combined with fresh hog shit, you are rendered impervious to any other odors which might someday come your way. So the blood and garlic didn't bother me. And I'd smelled worse, in particular the smell of fish paste and blood from all the dead Charlie's I'd wasted, too many times to count.

Problem. I hadn't been smooth, mainly because of the cigarette burn to my scalp, and as a result, I was covered in blood. It had to be taken philosophically. One cannot be a perfectionist. Perfectionism breeds pessimism. Because one never knows what the future holds, no matter how carefully one plans it. I, for example, hadn't counted on having a cigarette fly to the top of my head. So remember, no matter what profession you're in, whether it's telemarketing or bagging groceries, don't try to be perfect. Remember, there's just no way to predict the outcome of your life at any given time. Because it's in the little things comes the upsets. It always is.

### Chapter 11

Fortunately it was still warm out, although the evening chill was coming on fast. I stripped off my shirt and tossed it into the van. I figured I had maybe a minute or two more to prepare a surprise for the three men on the roof who were doubtless heading my way with some urgency, the better to escape the police net which would soon be in place. But as I was reaching for the pipe bomb and remote detonator in my bag, the rear door of the building flew open and the three men came charging out, and there we were, standing together in a grouping one might associate more with a cocktail party than an alleyway blood fest. There was a guy in a black turtleneck and five hundred dollar alligator shoes, holding a rocket launcher. A guy in a blue silk jacket and wide brimmed fedora, a cell phone stuck to the side of his face. A guy in a green jogging suit with lots of zippers and the latest generation of Air Nike's, clutching a gym bag. Scattered throughout the lot of them were more than a few gold chains. The cell phone guy had a pierced tongue, and a few too many earrings to suit my taste.

The men were staring hard. I could almost hear the buzzing of their intracranial circuitry as it fired up higher and higher to the level of threat assessment required to preserve them from loss of life and limb. They were going to do something, but I wasn't sure exactly what. It depended on how well they handled the element of surprise. When you've just fired a rocket into a man's apartment, then discover he's escaped, and you suddenly run into that same man, massive, bloody, shirtless, and angry, towering over you in a confined space, holding a very large killing knife, the very surprise of the situation can kill you. But rather than wait for them to simply die from fright, I decided to explain to them why this moment must inevitably be their last. So much violence is senseless these days. For my money, I think it's a happier death when one knows the reason for it. I decided to spread the happiness as far as I could.

"You killed my cat," I said. There was a reply from the green jogging suit. Presumably in Russian or one of those languages which are primarily guttural. The reply was short, maybe only five or six words. Perhaps he said he was sorry about the cat. Perhaps not. Somehow I tend to think he said something more in the way of a suggestion as to how I could perform certain unnatural acts upon myself, or upon my Granny, or possibly upon the dead cat.

The guy who held the rocket launcher must have had some training, because he dropped it and began backing away, at the same time reaching to his hip for some sort of weapon. The guy on the phone was frozen, looking at me in disbelief, unsure of whether or not to drop the phone and run, or report what he was seeing to the person on the other line. The guy with the gym bag reached inside it.

I don't watch the eyes. The eyes are the way to a man's soul and the way is full of dark turnings and shifty feints. I've seen men gutted from groin to sternum while staring into the eyes of their opponent. So I never look there when it's killing time. I watch the center body, taking a wide focus, absorbing with all my senses the play of light and shadow. I register everything but think about nothing. If you can't learn this first lesson you'll die in the novitiate stage from a hard kick in the balls you never saw coming.

If ever you must fight for your life, remember this--there is somebody deep inside you who has managed to survive and reproduce in a steady line for the past six thousand years or so. Somebody who's run the gauntlet of wild animals, both human and otherwise. Who has survived the onslaught of invading armies and the predations of robbers and thieves. You must now become that somebody. You must bring him forth, for it is only he who understands what must be done. You must turn off the sit-com of your life, remove your tie and coat, put on a bloody butcher's apron and switch on the meat grinder.

It was time to party. The rocket man's handgun was coming into play. A Ruger Blackhawk, the sort of weapon designed to blast through a foot-thick elephant skull at close range. The moon had come up in the east, haloed in the night smog, casting a surreal glow round about us. A cell phone clattered, and a pointed loafer came swinging upwards towards my balls. A bag fell to the ground and a switchblade knife clicked open somewhere to my right.

Three against one and nowhere to go. It was time for me to go to work. There is only one attitude to have at such a moment. Total contempt for the enemy. I stepped forward, toward the several hundred pounds of shifting, brightly feathered yet unredeemed humanity which needed, in my opinion, a transformation from it's present material form, a forging and repackaging, if you will, into something fit more properly for the furnaces of hell.

You don't know what will happen. You only know that you are stepping into another realm, where everything you are and everything you used to be fall away under the superheated pressure of an instinct so powerful it cannot be understood. It can only be reflected upon after the fact. An image of Johnson coming out of the shadows, and the silent, feral leap of a dog. The pointed loafer swatted to one side, the ankle bone cracking under the blow of a knife butt. A guy trying to slash at my head and missing completely. The boom of a shotgun. The man with the Blackhawk revolver still standing, headless in a halo of blood mist, his body unaware that the head was gone, unable to process the information without that very head. The jaws of a massive German Shepherd fastened firmly into the groin of a green jogging suit. The Bowie's heavy fifteen-inch blade on a full-power down stroke, cleaving the phone man's forehead wide open all the way down to his chin, the blade wrenched right then left, cracking the skull obscenely wide open, the brains, and blood and snot spilling over my hand like hot, runny oatmeal. The crunching sound of dog jaws on tailbone cartilage.

There's a unique silence in the aftermath of such a thing. When it's over, you back away and try to take it in. Had it lasted more than five seconds? I somehow doubted it. Time had no meaning at a moment like this. It was an illusion. One could imagine that this moment was the only moment there had ever been. All memories of life before the moment were but a dream from which one had finally awakened. But experience had taught me that outside of this transcendent bubble we were in, time was real, and the equally real world, offended by the fires and the noise and the bloodletting, would soon be closing in on this very tableau, where it would be analyzed carefully by sour-faced fat men with concrete souls and hearts of iron. The people of this world called those men The Force. I didn't want to be around when The Force started asking their questions and preparing their iron cages for those whom they intended to make heartily sorry for having offended them. I retrieved the grenade launcher, which was German made, and the equipment bag, which happened to contain a half-dozen rocket grenades. Never look a gift weapon in the barrel.

### Chapter 12

"Let's move out," I said. We walked back to our van and climbed in and Johnson started the engine. I looked at the floor of the van, where the two dead guys from Johnson's earlier encounter at Angela's place lay stinking in their own ooze. Johnson followed my gaze.

"Just a sec," he said. He got out and walked to the rear of the van and pulled the two dead guys into the alley and returned to the drivers seat.

"Might as well leave them all in one place," he said. "It'll be easier for the junkies to pick their pockets."

"I bet you straighten the magazines on the coffee table when nobody's looking," I said.

The air was beginning to crisp up. He put the heater on and offered me a sip from a short dog of Cutty he'd acquired from somewhere. I took a swallow and let out a breath and became aware that I'd been holding my air, as though I was underwater.

"Where to?" he said.

The ancient question. Where are we going? Did anybody really know? Short of Heaven or Hell, did it really matter? I pondered this. And remembered something. A woman's voice, a voice heavy with despair, and yet with a music that if ever it bubbled into song would be a balm for my dying soul. It was a balm I knew I must try and reach.

"Malibu," I said.

"Malibu?"

"Yeh. Let's go out to The Colony. You probably should let your wife know you're okay, and I wanna see Angela. Besides, I need a swim."

"You can't swim in the Pacific this time of year. There's riptides all over the place from that big storm down in Baja. Not to mention the water's barely above fifty degrees. You'll get sucked out a half mile and find yourself tangled up in all that kelp and shit."

"I'll risk it," I said. "It's the only thing that'll get this stink off."

"Come to think of it," he said, "you are a little ripe. And you could at least put a shirt on. We might get arrested if some cop sees me driving a van with a naked passenger."

"I've only got one clean shirt left. If I put it on now, it'll get all greasy from where you splattered me with that guy's head when you blew it clean off."

"Put the damn shirt on. We'll send somebody out for some fresh clothes later. You're a piece of work, McDougal, I have to admit that. Want some advice? Next time you decide to party, wear a raincoat."

I put the shirt on. We hit the Hollywood Freeway and headed north, winding our way past the Capitol Records building which earmarked Hollywood before climbing through Cahuenga pass and turning east on the Ventura Freeway clover leaf northward, across the Valley and through the pass which would take us to the cutover at Malibu Canyon road. And why not? A night at the beach never hurt anybody. Not as far as I knew. And I'd never been to The Colony before, where the minimum entry bid was five million dollars. Based solely on price alone, it wasn't the sort of place which normally hosted men such as myself. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it. There would be top shelf booze, satin sheets, pantries stocked with delicacies, and household help to answer to one's varied whims. A welter of new situations for me to face. Normally, facing new situations was cause for concern for anybody. But it was all a matter of attitude. To succeed in life, my Granny used to tell me, one must learn to adjust. Tonight I would soon be in residence somewhere in The Colony.

There'd be a lot of adjusting to do. For example, I'd have to adjust to the local native diet, which consisted mostly of nuts and fruits. I was pretty sure they wouldn't have any Big Macs for me to eat. And their pillows would be too soft. These things were but some of my initial petty concerns. Overshadowed by the hope that I'd be able to see Angela once more, and put myself close to that golden voice and proud bearing. So I put my worries away because somewhere, way deep down, I knew I'd find a way to handle the quick, albeit temporary degrading of my lifestyle. In fact, I felt certain I'd give a good accounting of myself.

To while away the time, I decided to look into the bag I'd just purloined from the dead guy in the green jogging suit. Which was when I made an important discovery.

"Pull off the freeway and find a place to park for a minute," I said. We exited the Ventura Freeway at Balboa and soon found ourselves in the parking lot adjacent to the Balboa Park tennis courts. The courts were brightly lit against a backdrop of upscale apartment complexes which attracted the kind of spiritually vapid people who'd been brainwashed at the local colleges, made decent salaries, played a little tennis during the week, cooked up a test tube baby now and then, and party'd a bit too much on weekends. Tonight there were few players playing. From the relaxed quality of their play, I guessed there weren't many in the bunch who'd had a rocket grenade fired into their living room any time in the past couple of hours.

"We're being tracked," I said.

"Say again?"

"Poon has some sort of tracking device in his vans. There's a hand-held GPS monitor in this bag. The featured location is our van, right here in Balboa park."

"We're being tracked right now. Ouch."

"That's how they found my apartment so quickly. When I parked the van in the alley, the GPS tracker led them right to me."

Johnson nodded. "Which means it wasn't a junky who stole the van from your place."

"Right," I said. "It was one of Poon's men who took it. They drove it away in spite of the fact it had two flat front tires. They did it to extract their buddy, Nose."

"Not to mention they removed it so it couldn't be connected with what they had planned next, which was blowing up your apartment with you in it."

I nodded. Johnson was still thinking like a cop. I wasn't thinking at all, and it showed. It was part of the price tag paid for jumping into an operation without planning anything in advance. I cursed myself. In times past, I might have spent days, weeks even, meticulously gathering the information necessary to carry off a successful mission. But this time, enraptured by a woman, and enraged by the death of a friend, I had simply reacted with my gut, and thrown myself to what was turning out to be a very powerful wolf indeed.

"You're a sloppy shit, aren't you?" Johnson said.

"Yeh. But I don't notice your detecting skills to be all that much either."

"I'm slipping," Johnson said. "I should have realized he'd have some sort of tracking on his vehicles. All the best drug dealers are using global tracking nowadays. It's not like it was in the old days, when Captain America kept the stuff hidden in his teardrop gas tank. Nowadays, most self-respecting drug dealers have better shipment tracking and on-time delivery than Fed-Ex."

"I think Lenny Poon's probably a little pissed off by today's events," I said.

"More than likely. Losing a son and six members of his crew in a single afternoon might have something to do with his mood being somewhat less than ethereal. Especially right before the weekend he hosts Gorbachev."

"We have one small advantage," I said.

"Which is?"

"They don't know we know about the tracking device."

"It's a start," he said.

### Chapter 13

I located the device in the side door panel, a blue plastic disk the size of a doughnut. There was a convertible Sebring parked at the near court. I strolled over, tossed the thing behind the front seat and returned to the van. Johnson headed back to the freeway and in an hour's time we were past a security kiosk and deep within a heavily landscaped network of narrow roads, motoring under a bridge and down a winding driveway before shutting down in the brick courtyard of what could best be described as a fantasy two-story Malibu beach pad, a construction of gray slate, redwood beams and expansive smoky glass, complete with private beach.

In L.A. you had to be somebody to have private beach access. Apparently, Johnson's sister in law was that somebody. They had money, and not the kind that was just on paper, but the kind where if need be, somebody could open a large safe deposit vault and come out with more than a few gold coins.

Johnson looked at me. "I can't believe you put the tracking device in some dweeb's convertible," he said. "What do you think's going to happen when Poon's man catches up with the dweeb?"

"The dweeb will discover new and untapped depths of fear," I said.

"You shouldn't have done that."

"I know."

"That's it? That's all you're going to say?"

I nodded, and Johnson and the dog headed for the front door, but I followed some redwood planking down the side of the place to some stairs which led me down to the beach. The five-foot surf was choppy, courtesy of a stiff offshore breeze, the whitecaps glimmering in the reflected beams from a half moon. It wasn't much, but it was at least enough to see by. I stripped naked save for the knife. You may ask yourself what kind of man goes swimming with a knife. And the answer is that there are many such men in the world, men who regard the sea, the air and the land as all components of the same battle zone.

Okay, let's get real. Mother Earth hates your guts and has been trying to get rid of you for thousands of years. She's poisoned you with thorns, eaten you alive with her monstrous animals, bitten you with her snakes, driven you off with her droughts and drowned you in her floods. So, with this basic truth firmly in mind, I, in defiance of all this, kept the knife strapped to my body and in no time at all I found myself doing a slow backstroke through the swells parallel to the coastline, about an eighth of a mile offshore. Malibu is a cove where the swells break a good couple of hundred yards out, and I was happy to avoid the pounding a typical shore break could have caused.

Yeh, it was winter and the water was ice cold. Handling cold water is a state of mind. There is a room in your head where all the circuits connect. You have to go in there and reroute the pain circuits and tell yourself that what you're feeling is just a meaningless vibration and nothing more. Once done, you keep moving and after a few minutes your thermostat kicks in and the warmth floods your body.

I didn't know how far I'd have to swim to get the stink off me. To Japan, perhaps, judging by the acrid, lingering presence of Gregor's death. Which was when it hit me exactly how right the idea was. There was a purity to the notion of swimming to Japan. A penitence to the act itself. And the Land of the Rising Sun was a land of violence and redemption.

Or had I gone too far with the killing of young Gregor? Maybe there was no place I could go. Perhaps the stink would never come off. Or maybe Johnson was right. Maybe at this point, I would need to find myself a new religion. One which had a dry cleaning service of the soul for such as I Yes. It was clear to me. I would swim to Japan. Of course, it was impossible, and that was the reason I knew I had to try. The very impossibility of it meant that I would either die trying or experience a miracle so incomprehensible that it would never be talked about to any other human being.

Is the world really a place of time and distance? Or is it a dream which allows constantly for the impossible to occur with any frequency necessary for the salvation of the wounded? I would have to believe the latter. I would swim to Japan. I would arrive in a state of complete putrefaction, my body reduced to nothing more than a shell inside which something stank to High Heaven. The smell would attract the monks like bees to a flowering vine. There would be a saffron robe to hide the sores and the pus, and a ringing of many bells to summon the requisite spirits able to quench the hellfire raging in my spirit. My interior landscape would be meticulously raked and rearranged into the exact flowing pattern needed to align my energies with that of the Almighty. Thus assured that perhaps salvation was still possible, I put everything out of my mind and continued on to Japan, a lazy backstroke moving me infinitesimally closer and closer to the sublimity of it all.

A sublimity which lasted about thirty seconds. And was then rudely interrupted. I sensed it before I felt it. A presence in the water of something large. I was not alone. A shark fin only slightly smaller than the tail fin of Air Force One broke the surface at twenty five yards and closing, the surreal phosphorescence of the surrounding wake mesmerizing me, the push of the predator's forward motion rudely registered by my every fiber as the many tons of water displaced by its enormous bulk shoved me sideways.

I had no time. The damn thing didn't circle, or sniff or test anything first. It simply rushed me with jaws wide open. In the split second before we collided, I was invaded by a surge of truth, and understood everything perfectly. I knew why the cosmos had come into existence and how everything was going to wind up. I understood my role in all of it, and why I'd had to play it the way I had. I knew this without the hindrance of words to describe it. It was the gift the shark was giving to me prior to its removing me from my formerly lofty position at the top of the food chain.

In a matter of days, or hours, depending on the speed of the beast's digestive tract, I was going to become shark shit. This certain knowledge enlightened me. Yes, I was infused with the truth, and finally knew for certain the exact state of my affairs and what it was I had done to bring myself to this juncture.

When I'd killed Gregor, he'd gone straight to Heaven, where even now he was looking down on me. Gregor was no longer wan, and crippled. He was in possession of some hefty new powers as befits a citizen of the celestial realms.

Which was why Gregor had sent a bad-assed fish to bite me in half.

We all have our gifts. The shark's gift is violently dismembering live creatures and gulping down the constituent parts. My gift was more spiritual in nature. It was the gift of the warrior's pride. I was a warrior, first and foremost. A warrior fights back, no matter the odds. It wasn't important that I was going to die. It was only important that I die proudly, fighting back. Important that I do everything I could to at least make the price of killing me as high as possible. So that when the review board looked things over, they would record that when the nasty-ass shark took out John McDougal, at least John made the critter suffer for it, in some small way.

Of course, I was a warrior who had traditionally fought against men. And not having been trained to fight off a very large shark, I had no game plan, save for letting it come naturally. I simply allowed instinct to take over, pulling my killing knife from its scabbard, and retracting my extremities into as tight and small a target as possible. Which wasn't saying much, as it wasn't likely the beast could miss a three-hundred pound wad of flesh under any circumstances. And yet, inasmuch as my retraction was at the last possible second before impact, the shark, perhaps following his regular routine of going for the part that was elongated and fluttering and perhaps resembling a seal or something, did miss chomping off my legs by a fraction. He did not, however, miss me entirely, and slammed into me with his enormous, sandpapery side, the feeling not unlike being slapped by the waterlogged trunk of a giant sequoia.

Phase Two. The shark stopped and turned his enormous snout for the inevitable expert followup snap. Which, was, I figured, my last chance. And thanks to the splendid refulgence of the moon, I could see the beast clearly, we were practically eye-to-eye. So what the hell. I simply jammed my blade straight into his unwinking orb and buried it to the hilt. At which point, all hell broke loose and I took a hit from a tail fin which knocked me out of the water and straight up a good ten feet before landing me, breathless, in a resounding belly flop on the surface, where I gasped and sucked just like any organism suddenly finding itself on the wrong end of a deadly predation. This was how it would end. The sounds of wheezing mingled with the crunch of teeth on bone.

Except all was eerily quiet on the Malibu front. It took me awhile to realize I was alone with my fears. The beast was gone. To wherever sharks go when somebody sticks an eighteen-inch blade in their eye.

### Chapter 14

Swimming for shore was out of the question. I was too damn tired. A sea-change had occurred--I now wanted to live another day. Swimming for Japan was postponed. The god of death, having jumped up and run to the balcony railing to watch my undoing now returned to his seat to wait for another try at me later.

I had been thoroughly drown-proofed in the SEALS and although too tired to swim to the certain safety of land, assumed the position, floating just beneath the surface, gulping a breath, floating some more, fluttering the hands to bob to the surface, gulping and so forth. I could go on like this for hours if need be. After a time, I felt a little stronger and began a slow lazy backstroke towards the shore. Time and tide had carried me perhaps a hundred yards south of the beach house, so I relaxed and made slow but steady progress. Which was when I heard the boat coming. Heard, rather than saw, because it was approaching slowly from the open ocean, running lights out. I nearly laughed in spite of myself as it came into view. It was a 15-foot Zodiac raft, a boat with which I am well-acquainted. There were four men besides the coxswain at the tiller, and nothing about their menacing outlines against the faintly glowing Los Angeles nighttime sky suggested lost tourists. No, this was something launched from a yacht somewhere farther out specifically to insert a lightly armed raiding party into the Malibu colony. Except this was no ordinary group. The fortuitous identity of the coxswain was not lost to me. It was none other than Lenny Poon himself.

Lenny was going to run straight over me, not looking, as he should have been, for his personal demise to be awaiting him in the form of a big naked man a hundred yards off shore out for a midnight swim. I adjusted my angle slightly and began to crawl into his path just in time to snag my hand on a rope and enjoy the tow into shore. The craft lurched slightly as it picked up my bulk, but nobody went crazy or anything. As I said, nobody was looking for death to suddenly arrive from a hitchhiker in the breakers. The craft beached and four men headed quickly up the beach to a place where, I was certain, Johnson and his dog would be more than a match. Meanwhile, I had business with the coxswain, who stayed behind to provide security for the craft.

_Bobby_ , I thought, moving up to within inches of Poon from behind. _It is time for retribution_.

The End

### Also by this author:

The Most Dangerous Time. A frightened woman leaves her abusive husband only to find he now intends to kill her. In spite of this, she feels the need to go back to him. Her friends, however, have other ideas, including a fresh romance and a wicked revenge plot.

Jackie's Week. A single woman goes into hiding after she is attacked by a thug, but finds herself the target of assassination when she discovers he has tracked her down. Struggling with PTSD and panic attacks, she must find a way to pull herself together and fight back.

All That Was Happy. A woman undergoes a nasty divorce and finds herself experiencing suicidal depression and panic attacks. She desperately seeks relief in the arms of a younger man and gets a lot more than she bargained for.

A Small Matter. A lonely woman is given a death sentence of pancreatic cancer. She decides not to fight it but her best friend has other ideas, including an impulsive offer to marry and take one last wild ride through life.

And in Summer, Fire. When Los Angeles woman Donica Kelly has a breakdown during a rush hour commute, she is helped by a handsome stranger, only to find herself almost instantly up a tree with no way down.

Final Arrangements. A young successful woman is thrown for a loop when a handsome but crazy talking stranger claims she has been given to him in marriage by her deceased father.

Firefight. An ex-Navy SEAL who is down on his luck agrees to freelance for the local mafia Don and soon finds himself the target of multiple assassins.

