

### Gunsanity

#### a novel

####

#### by

####

#### Marcus A. Hennessy

####

##### Copyright 2015 Smashwords, Inc.

##### Smashwords Edition

##### ISBN No. 978-1-3115-1203-1

#####

##### Smashwords License Notes

##### This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be re-sold or distributed to others. If you wish to share this novel, please encourage readers to purchase their own copies.

#####

##### **Gunsanity** is a work of fiction.

##### The characters are the creation of the author and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. While some locations and settings correspond to actual places, most are fictitious.

#

" _It's very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It's easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other."_

― _Fred Rogers_ , _The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember_

"The Constitution of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."

― _Thomas_ Jefferson, _letter to John Cartwright_

Don't run from a sniper, you'll just die tired.

―From a gun-rights website

# Chapter 1

He was just a bus driver, white, overweight, tired, steering his long red Metro beast back to the yard at a few minutes before midnight. He kept it at an even 60 mph, transitioned to the 2 Freeway south from the 210 eastbound, a few cars whizzing past and around him on the wide, dark freeway.

_What a shitty day,_ he thought to himself. _Smelly riders, alotta bums now, bag ladies always mumbling to themselves, never have the right change. God I need a beer...cold...maybe two...ah, fuck it._ He knew he'd be hitting the Jack first, a quick shot, then another...

Too sudden to be startled, or to react, windshield exploding, loud, then everything white, a crimson red hole in the middle of all that white, the very last image of his earthly life.

" _...and a city Metro bus overturned on the Two freeway near Glendale last night after the driver apparently lost control and slammed into a freeway median. There were no passengers on board but the driver was ejected from the vehicle and was pronounced dead at the scene...."_

—Maria Delgado, KXLA Five Live at Five news anchor

## ***

# Chapter 2

"You didn't mow the lawn." The voice firm, thin, serrated.

"I'll do it tomorrow."

"After your tennis game?"

"Sure...after my tennis game."

"You won't be too tired?"

"No, not all."

"What about the spa?"

"What about it?"

"Did you check it?"

"Uh...yeah." A minor lie.

"The water looks green."

"It's fine."

"You really checked it and the balance was good?"

"Peggi, I really checked it...used the p-h meter and everything."

He had his black Persian on his stomach, Exene, a geriatric fur ball purring sporadically. He couldn't see his wife but her voice ambushed him from behind as he reclined on the tattered plaid sofa in his study.

"If we just turn it on and let it heat up, the green'll disappear," Luke said.

He could see her reflection in the black flat screen monitor on his desk.

She crunched mini-carrots from a cello bag as she leaned against the door in a favorite beige suit, her faux blonde hair a helmet on her narrow head. One of her little ruses, pretending to be casually engaged when in fact she was seething, resenting his Friday "sick day" when she had to work.

The spa. She called it "the spa" because it sounded better than "the hot tub" or "the Jacuzzi" and it cost her nearly as much as a swimming pool to install. Sure, it was nice, and large, and deep, and at this point in their fragile marriage it was the only place where he could get it up without her having to wear props, or talking dirty to him.

Maybe it was the excitement thing, the thought that the hillbilly teenagers next door might be peeping through the tall hedge, learning something about middle-aged sex and laughing at Peggi's caterwauling just before she came. More likely, though, the sensation of that hot green water swirling around his nutsack, that was the stimulation he needed. Way better than Cialis, too—no headache. They'd done it there the week before, Brit was sleeping over at Melissa's and it was nice, they fucked for a while and he was able to come without much effort. Later they simmered in the steamy water, talked about drinking wine back when they could, and kicked around summer plans for a Mayan ruins adventure in Honduras. But that positive vibe had long since dissipated and now all he had to defend himself was a 17-year-old black cat on his stomach.

"So then what else did you do today?" she probed.

"I, uh...I did some writing...another blog..."

"Mmm. And what else?"

Luke didn't care any more that she dismissed his blogging as a frivolous escape from serious obligation. In fact, he quietly relished the notion that she despised his web site, "Mandrake's Take," which he'd mounted a year earlier. He considered it an act of rebellion every time he posted a new blog, and derived extra motivation from the words she'd spouted in a heated clash after reading his very first post, a ranting diatribe against a TEA Party acolyte running for the U.S. Senate in California. _"All that blogging crap is just verbal masturbation!"_ she'd hollered at him. Verbal masturbation. He loved to write, and he loved to masturbate. Perfect.

"Okay...I watered in front. And I really did have a headache this morning."

She made a noise, something between a grunt and a sigh, started to leave, then regrouped.

"You wanna go for a walk?"

He closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead. She didn't want to go for a walk. She just wanted to yank his chain and get him off his ass.

"Sure. Let's go for a walk."

## ***

# Chapter 3

They ate dinner in the kitchen nook that night, on the butcher-block table.

Peggi thought it'd be nice to barbecue chicken so Luke scraped the old charred and hardened flesh off the propane grill and laid down thighs and legs that had been marinating in teriyaki sauce while she baked sweet potatoes and made salad.

"So I need to create this, like, this diorama that, um, that shows what Twain was trying to say about slavery."

Britney, in her pink Juicy Couture lounge suit sitting next to Peggi. The daughter had her mother's green eyes, equine nose, pert lips, and big boobs. She talked as she ate, her brown hair up, as Luke cut into an over-cooked thigh and raised an eyebrow, his way of feigning interest in his stepdaughter's homework.

"You mean like a pictorial kind of diorama?" Peggi, chewing her food like a sailor, the masticated sweet potato filling the gaps in her capped teeth.

"Yeah, like some kind of three-D display...I'm not really sure. I have the assignment written down...I'll show it to you."

"Great book... _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,_ " Luke interjected.

"I kind'a hate it," Britney shot back, hunched over her salad. "He keeps using the word 'nigger' all the time and I didn't get that whole thing with the Shakespeare revival show."

She had a way of sneering, Peggi's daughter, a way of pursing her lips and canting her head that quietly infuriated him.

"So mom, can you help me with that later?"

"Sure," Peggi said, mashing a sweet potato with her fork. "Show me the assignment... after the news."

Luke got up, took his plate to the sink and went outside to clean off the grill. When he came back in a local broadcast was on the plasma screen, a slim reporter guy doing a remote from a freeway:

" _...in what authorities are now calling a homicide. The victim, forty-four-year-old Garth McFarland, had just ended his shift in his L.A. Metro bus and was driving southbound on the Two Freeway when the bus veered sharply to the left, crashed into the center median and rolled several times. Initially, investigators believed he died from injuries sustained in the crash. But now they say McFarland was shot, either by another motorist or a gunman off the freeway. Witnesses to the crash say they saw nothing unusual prior to the incident so police are asking anyone who might have knowledge of this apparent shooting on the Glendale Freeway..."_

"That's horrible." Peggi said in her green sweat suit nestled into the loveseat, looking to Luke like an unripe banana.

"Yeah," he answered as he loaded the dishwasher. "Probably some kind of road rage...like back in the 90s...remember that? All the road-rage shootings? That's why I bought my Ruger."

"Don't start the washer until it's full," she said.

After the news and Britney's homework and a movie on HBO about young JFK and all the women he banged, Luke and Peggi went to bed. He started to read his latest _New Yorker_ but she rolled on top of him, naked, as she always went to bed, pecked his face with wet kisses and made her desires known. Apparently, the Kennedy movie had stirred some passion.

After vigorously rubbing her clit with his tongue for five minutes until her squeaky orgasm (that she masked by holding a pillow over her face) and the habitual fart that had become a clarion to bail from his kneeling position by the bed, Luke evaluated the rigidity of his erection and decided to go ahead with intercourse rather than ask for a tidy hand job. So that afterwards, despite the day's quota of irritations, he could at least go to sleep knowing he'd been able to perform, to meet his obligations as a dutiful husband, and that she would reward him tomorrow by leaving him alone to write another blog.

## ***

# Chapter 4

" _We are getting reports of an accident involving an overturned commuter van this morning on the Fourteen Freeway near Acton with at least two fatalities, causing a Sig Alert that's closed all southbound lanes and a major traffic back-up all the way to Lancaster...."_

—Bonnie Scott, KROK radio traffic reporter

Peggi had clinical issues when it came to sleeping so Luke had to perform some ninja moves when he rolled out of bed at 5 a.m. every morning. This meant no noise, no sudden movement, and a camping headlamp that he put on to avoid bedroom obstacles while tiptoeing into the hallway.

Britney slept and snored like a lumberjack so he had no problem shambling past her bedroom door before heading down the stairs to let the cats out.

The cats. His custody prize from a dead marriage to the girl he met in college. A thin, toothy blonde, Diana, she'd twisted his heart into knots for a few years until entropy kicked in and the marriage turned moribund. That's when she got a job managing the office of a sentimental veterinarian in Sherman Oaks and started her collection of strays, runts, and mutts to channel the love Luke could no longer reciprocate. The 22 cats, three mongrel mutts, a pygmy pig and an opossum named Bush finally got them evicted from their cozy two-bedroom rental in Van Nuys and that's when she said _"Fuck it...I hate this city and I hate my life!"_ Her friend Tracy lived on five acres in Petaluma and Diana moved there abruptly, leaving Luke with the geriatric Persian, Exene, and a skittish Siamese mix, Zoomer, who'd bitten Peggi twice.

"If you expect those damn animals to stay in this house, they will obey rules!" Peggi had declared a few days after their honeymoon in Costa Rica, when Luke had moved his possessions and the cats from a rented one-bedroom cabana in Culver City.

They had to stay in the study, the downstairs bedroom where Luke had crammed what remained of his furniture: a cheap metal desk, a couple bentwood chairs, a coffee table, and that sofa Peggi called "nauseating." That meant putting litter boxes in the closet and building a clever little ramp outside the window so they could enter and exit the back yard when he was in the room.

"Do not let them into the rest of the house. Period!" She was adamant about this, claiming their dander got into the noses of the half-dozen patients she saw in the living room of her pea-green, four-bedroom, three-bath French provincial-style home in Pacific Palisades.

"Sure thing, darlin'," Luke had pledged.

Still, he derived some adolescent joy from letting the cats roam through the house in the wee hours of dawn as he brewed his coffee and steeled himself for 90 minutes of intense blogging. Zoomer enjoyed digging his claws into her pricey IKEA sectional so Luke had to stay on top of that, and Exene would occasionally toss a wet fur ball on the hardwood floor, but after a few minutes they'd meander to the rear French doors and he'd shoo them into the yard so he could concentrate on his work.

His work: "Mandrake's Take." The creative residue from various obsessions to become first a serious screenwriter, then an award-winning playwright who dabbled in acting, and finally, the owner-operator of his own mega-studio where he would produce powerful films that altered the course of human history. Just like the tens of thousands of other aspiring, _soi-disant_ writers who sat in front of their PCs every day cranking out stories that lacked some key, crucial elements such as compelling plot lines, rich and complex characters, and most importantly, that elusive and rare ingredient called "talent."

For a while, his multiple pages of liberal rants, biting movie reviews, mocking celebrity profiles and a retail page—where readers could buy black tee's featuring pics of his angular face spouting slogans of his own creation—had done much to replenish the self-esteem he'd lost after hitting an alcoholic bottom nine years earlier. The only downside to his blogging, in his mind, was the fact that few people really gave a shit about what he had to say, based on the modest triple digits of his "hits" counter, and the pathetic tee-shirt sales. He'd sold two.

He considered some options to bolster interest in his blogs: post some amusing vids of his cats chasing each other, or of Peggi snoring naked on the bed; cull the internet for the most obnoxious rumors and gossip about celebrities, pols, and sports stars and write rants based on them; develop a kind of "Dear Abbey" advice column to help men, especially alcoholic men, cope with marital problems or work-related issues. But over time he discovered that many, many people were already blogging about all of that crap, and that you could find literally hundreds of cute kitty and snoring videos on YouTube.

Then he saw a "60 Minutes" report on an FOB, or Forward Operating Base, in Afghanistan, that stirred some fierce visceral passion. YES! America's useless boondoggle war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban: over 2200 troops killed since 2001, upwards of 25,000 civilian deaths in twelve years, with a country primed for bloody civil war once the U.S. withdrew the bulk of its forces, at a cost of over a trillion dollars to American taxpayers!

The idea of posting socially relevant and meaningful anti-war polemics reanimated his creative energies, and he began to troll the internet for ideas. After perusing nearly fifty blogs devoted to pro-war, anti-war, and wishy-washy middle-of-the-road war views, he landed on a website, "TributeMoms.com," where wives of soldiers posted actual letters and e-mails from their husbands serving in Afghanistan. Some of the missives made his eyes misty and his throat thick with emotion as he read about the transformation of vibrant men into sad, cynical, volatile veterans.

The personal accounts of children killed and maimed by misguided U.S. mortars, of vital Afghan livestock shot and butchered for sport by jaded Marines, and of soldiers getting slaughtered in ambushes inspired Luke to plagiarize the letters and disguise them in a format so no one could accuse him of stealing what amounted to honest accounts of a war that could never be won.

And that's how Sergeant Gutter was born:

Greetings, readers. Today I received another dispatch from Sergeant Gutter, still on station at a remote FOB outside the Korangal Valley. Here he describes the downing of a Blackhawk medivac chopper near Bibiyal: "HQ sent our platoon to recon a farmhouse hit by a drone the day before, what they called a 'bad data' incident—you know, ooops, sorry we blew the shit out of your whole family by mistake—and see if we could find anyone or anything left to apologize to, and the bad guys knew we'd show up because they gave us a little housewarming party with a hailstorm of RPG's and mortars. Three of our guys got hit, Corporeal Watson got his junk blown off and parts of both hands and Captain Nordstrom lost an eye, and so we dialed in for an evac and heard the bird about ten minutes later. The firestorm let up and we knew the towel heads heard that chopper, too, so we got on the radio and told the evac team to stand by, the area was super-hot, but the pilot must've wanted a medal real bad because he brought that ship in so low to the ground, I mean it was a sight to see, right up until that RPG round hit the tail rotor and..."

That's when Peggi knocked twice on the study door before throwing it open in her pink paisley robe.

"Were the cats in the living room?" she barked in a gruff morning voice.

Luke peered over the top of the monitor, his desk positioned like a rampart against intrusions.

"Uh, no, hun...they went straight outside."

"Because I saw a big wad of black fur on the floor and I've got Pocahontas coming in today for a special one-on-one."

"Must be from last week then," he said dryly, hunkering low behind the screen.

"Okay, whatever. Can you please vacuum them up now? Please? She'll be here in an hour and I need to take a shower."

Pocahontas was one of her patients, the 13-year-old daughter of San Francisco Giants superstar Angel Guerrero, major-league womanizer, HGH juicer and homerun hitter who only saw his daughter a couple days a month, to which Pocahontas reacted by cutting herself with razor blades, smoking crack and having an abortion.

Luke finished an acceptable draft of what would be the thirtieth Sgt. Gutter post, worthy of some special banner graphics he would create with his adequate HTML skills. His salty, war-weary creation deserved as much, having rekindled some sense of purpose in Luke's otherwise dreary routine. Best of all, the Gutter posts appealed to folks and had drawn substantially more readers to his blog: hits stood at nearly 5000, with a slew of supportive comments in his e-mail cache:

Hey, I think Sgt. Gutter deserves some serious medals for all the shit he's seen in our crusade against the Towel-ban in Affganistan (sic). I really enjoy his exploits....

—Mike P. in Chicago

Just got back from my second tour in the 'Stan and eager to go back. I hope Gutter isn't all about killing like he seems to be. We're really helping those people to start a democracy and I strongly believe our work over there isn't finished, especially when it comes to wiping out the drug lords and the corrupt heads of state.

—Gunnery Sgt. T. Mettler, Oceanside, CA

gutter reminds me of me and his despatches make me laugh when I really need to laugh even though it hurts what's left of my face lol! i can really relate to his tude towards the war although most grunts do enjoy blowing up the tallyban and al quida (sic)...."

—zach in Maryland

Just past 7:30 Luke hauled the vacuum out from the closet under the stairs and did his chore, rolling it with hostile vigor through the living room and banging into Peggi's furniture.

"Luke! Luke!" Britney, standing at the hallway threshold in her skimpy pink Juicy pajamas, hair askew, her lithe legs creamy white.

He turned off the machine. "Yeah Brit."

"Do you have to do that now? Jeezuz, it's not even eight yet."

"Special request from your mom. Pocahontas is coming over."

"Shit," she mumbled, "that weirdo," and went into the kitchen.

Luke put the vacuum away and migrated upstairs to make peace with his wife before meeting Danny for tennis in Rancho Park.

In her beige panties and bra Peggi tried on a blouse and faced him.

"You haven't even kissed me this morning," she said with a mock pout.

"Sorry, hun, my bad," he said, moving close, pressing his lips to hers. She slid her wet tongue into his mouth and he reciprocated, the two of them Frenching like it meant something. He could taste the remnants of mango she'd had for breakfast and a hint of the Kona blend coffee she preferred, and backed off.

"Mary wants us to come over next Sunday for a little thing she's throwing for Terrence...it's his sixtieth," she said casually. "I told her that was fine."

"Sixty...wow. He doesn't look that old."

"It's not 'that old.' We're not so far away ourselves."

"No, I know, but he looks good for his age, that's all I'm saying."

"Well, he takes care of himself."

"I guess he can afford to."

"Money has nothing to do with it."

Luke threw on his shorts, a white Polo, stuffed some socks into his tennis shoes and found his white aussie cap on the chair.

He left the room without saying goodbye.

## ***

# Chapter 5

Luke enjoyed his tennis matches with Danny because he was better than Danny, Danny knew it, and there was little pretense or anxiety about who would win. Danny had a fairly good excuse, however: pins in his pelvis and a right knee reconstruction as a result of a motorcycle accident in 1998. Which meant Luke could play easy with him, concentrate on his ground strokes, refine his serve, and not worry about taking every single point.

At five feet six, Daniel Moncavage didn't seem like your typical Purple Heart grunt vet from Operation Desert Storm, but he had a build like a beer keg and the voice of a man who'd seen all the colors and carnage of war. He also told a great joke and shared some of the bawdiest stories Luke had ever heard, mostly of whores in the Philippines that he preferred to fuck two and three at a time. He'd banged his share of white girls, too, back in the day, but time and weight issues had slowed him down and his main priority now was keeping his semi-hot Chinese girlfriend happy and three boutique car-audio install shops open in the Long Beach area.

"Ah, shit, watch the motherfuckin' ball, Danny!" he kept yelling at himself, earning a few hostile looks from other players on adjacent courts. He knew it was bad tennis etiquette and occasionally he'd laugh and yell "Sorry!" at the nearby women giving him the evil eye, but he was having fun and Luke got a kick out of his vulgar outbursts.

Later, after winning a set and throwing a couple extra games for Danny's benefit, Luke treated him to lunch at the Sutter Mill Saloon Company on Pico where in the days before the Twelve Steps he'd sailed into oblivion on 16-ounce schooners of Anchor Steam.

"Okay, so a guy's getting it on with his girlfriend, right, they're doing sixty-nine, all the nasty, right?" Danny, telling a joke to a sweaty Luke as they waited for burgers. "And the guy remembers, 'Shit, I've got a dentist appointment I can't miss.' So he gets up, throws on some clothes, brushes his teeth. Twenty minutes later he's at the dentist who's looking in his mouth and says, 'Mmm, mind if I ask a personal question? Have you been doing sixty-nine recently?' And the guy says, 'How can you tell, doc? I gargled and brushed my teeth.' And the dentist says, 'Yeah, but your forehead smells like shit.'"

Luke broke into a hacking laugh that drew looks from the small crowd in the aging fern bar and Danny chortled along with him.

Their food came and Danny asked him how things were going with Peggi.

"I dunno, Danner," Luke said, stoking his mouth with fries. "Lately, I...I wonder what I'm doing. Things just seem so mundane...so routine. When I was acting, struggling...at least I had a goal. A mission. I was focused, committed...I knew who I was. Now, today...I'm a guy doing house chores for a bi-polar head doc in the Palisades and working a job a fuckin' chimp could do. The only thing that keeps my head above water is the blog. Have you checked it out yet... 'Mandrake's Take: The Gutter Dispatches'? You'd like it."

Danny fingered the chili that had slid off his hamburger and held it high over his mouth before dropping it into his maw and chewing viciously. "Naw, sorry Luker...no time these days. Business is down in two of my stores and Jasmine's been busting my balls to take her out more. Besides, why do I wanna read about that shit? I was in it...up to my fuckin' eyeballs. No need to raise the dead, so-to-speak."

Luke felt a tinge of disappointment but concealed it. "Yeah...and how's that going...with Jasmine? She still 'the one' you've been searching for?"

Danny snorted. "Fuck, dude...there is no 'the one.' They're all fuckin' crazy...every last one of 'em. Every girlfriend I've ever had...major mood swings, insecurities up the ass, and always with the money, you know? Fuck, I'm still paying off Wendy's goddamned credit card debt."

"Yeah, you know...it's funny. Peggi...she's loaded. I mean, not loaded-loaded, but with the house I'm guessing worth about two mill..."

"No shit. Lucky fuckin' you."

"Hey, I told you she had money. But even so...she bugs me about it...thinks I should be earning more."

"They all do. It's genetic with them...like a nesting instinct or something. I read once where these birds in England, like quail, the males build the nests first and show 'em off to the females, and the dudes with the best nests get the best quail snatch."

"Yeah. The best nests. Peggi's the one with the nest. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn't Peggi I married but her nest...the house, the kids, the seaside city lifestyle."

"I thought she looked awesome at your wedding," Danny mumbled through his food. "That pink outfit she wore made her look like some hot flight attendant from Virgin Airlines."

"Funny you should say that. A month after the wedding I actually booked a flight on Virgin, to get away. I mean for good. I was gonna escape to Germany and change my identity."

"You fuckin' serious?"

"Totally true. All her harping about my job situation drove me to some really violent thoughts. I was gonna live in Stuttgart with an aunt..."

"You never told me this, dude."

"I've never told anyone, 'til now. The only thing that stopped me was my cats. I couldn't bear the idea of giving them away."

Danny chuckled. "Wow...an angry man devoted to his cats...that's fresh."

"'Yeah...and your forehead smells like shit.'" Luke laughed again and went into a coughing fit that nearly brought up the meat he'd just swallowed.

## ***

# Chapter 6

When he ambled into the family area an hour later Luke saw Britney sitting askew in the crusty green BarcaLounger watching some teenage chick flick on the wide Samsung flat screen.

"Hey Brit," he said.

She was in another Juicy Couture outfit, a sleeveless pink tee and short-shorts, her gangly legs bent in a weird W shape. She glanced at him, went back to the TV.

"Hey Luke. Mom's upstairs...has a headache. Poc didn't show...mom was pissed."

"Mmm...that's too bad."

Luke pretended to watch the movie for a second, climbed the stairs and went into the bedroom where Peggi lay on the bed in a gray leisure suit, a fuzzy black sleep shade covering the top of her face.

He sat on the bed beside her but she didn't move.

"Hey darling. You got a headache?"

"Where've you been?" she grumbled.

"I bought Danny lunch after the match...he needed to vent. Brit told me that..."

"Yes, they cancelled on me. Some sort of crisis at home. I was hoping we could go out and do something...but then I got this stupid headache. I wish you'd call me when you think you might be late...we've talked about this before."

Luke got up, went into the closet to undress for a shower.

"Okay, but I told you Thursday I was playing tennis and we usually have lunch after. You know the drill."

"Well, just because I know the drill doesn't mean I have to like it."

She folded her arms on her chest and made her snorting sulking noise and Luke recalled what he'd just talked about with Danny, how all relationships required "some serious fucking effort." He went back to the bed.

"Hey, wifey, listen to me."

She pushed the sleep shade up and he focused on her green eyes.

"Let me get some stuff done around here, then I'll fire up the spa and hustle down to Ralphs's for some quality red meat. Steaks and nookie...how's that sound?"

The tension eased from her face and she cracked a grin. "I definitely like the nookie part."

"Just the way you like it."

"Yippee," she tittered, and Luke kissed her gingerly before bolting for the bathroom.

## ***

# Chapter 7

It took about three hours to get the water temp up around 105 degrees where Peggi liked it so Luke had time to mow the front yard and water the patches of dianthus, verbena, lantana, dahlia and petunias she struggled to cultivate. The withered rose garden in back gave testimony to her pathetic gardening skills but the flowers in front were still holding their own after she'd made a half-dozen runs to a local nursery a couple weeks earlier to buy trays of flowers and harangue the staff for advice on soil amendments and watering schedules.

Done with chores, he jumped into his silver Toyota Tacoma truck and drove the three blocks to the Ralphs on Sunset where he bought a package of porterhouse beef, a bunch of asparagus and a bag of mini-red potatoes that he'd fry up with garlic and Vidalia onions. How nice it would be to swill it all down with a bottle or two or three of a rich cabernet or burgundy. Yeah, sure, idiot, flush nine years of sobriety down the toilet on a whim, he chided himself. Still, the self-imposed prohibition brought him down so he grabbed a Milky Way bar at the checkout counter and devoured it by the time he got back to the house.

Britney was gone, out cavorting with friends again on a Saturday night. Luke set the steaks in a quick marinade of raw olive oil, sea salt and hastily sliced garlic, prepped the asparagus, sliced the potatoes and onions as Peggi came down in a green terry robe and grabbed a bottle of Perrier from the fridge.

"I am sooo hungry," she cooed, leaning into him, kissing his ear. "And sooo horneee."

"Mmm...me too, doll."

_Doll._ He rarely called her that anymore.

"Hurry up with that...I'm going in."

She practically skipped out of the French doors into the patio.

"I'll be out in two shakes," he hollered.

The back yard was semi-private, surrounded on three sides by a high hedge that separated her place from the Bettendorf's Cape Cod monstrosity at the south edge, the Zimmerman's Craftsman house to the rear, and the McMaster's ranch eyesore adjacent to her long driveway. To get to the spa you took a short path through the no-man's land she called a rose garden, cut an oblique at the converted garage, now a nifty guest cottage, and opened a short metal gate onto the deck.

He grabbed a Beck's NA beer from the frig and watched Peggi in the aquamarine glow of the spa light, no pretense of a bathing suit. She tossed the robe onto the chaise and jumped into the water where she bobbed in the steamy condensation, the water jets humming loud and turning the water into a frothy cauldron.

As she yelped and thrashed about, Luke had a sudden notion that maybe some wires got crossed, a short-circuit in the spa's lighting system, and she wasn't frolicking at all but convulsing from a few hundred volts of electricity surging through her body. _Dude, why would you think that,_ he wondered to himself. _And why are you smiling to yourself?_

He went to his study, checked on his cats who were both sleeping on the sofa, peeled off his cargo shorts and grabbed a heavy black towel from the bathroom.

For a woman who'd crossed the 50-something threshold Peggi looked good naked and had fine legs for someone who didn't run, cycle, or do much more than the occasional hike or yoga class. She'd had a great rack as a younger woman, at least in the photos she'd shown him, but nursing two kids and gravity had taken a toll.

"The water's great!" she chortled as Luke made his way to the deck. He smiled down at her, focused on her crimson areolas, tossed the towel on top of her robe and circled around to the stairs to ease himself into the froth.

"It's hot," he bleated.

"Don't be a wimp...it's perfect."

No, it was hot, and he wondered if the heat might kill his nascent boner as he sat down on the submerged bench seat and oriented himself to the noise, and Peggi's incandescent face leering at him through the steam.

They kissed. He ran his hands over her tits, supple and pliant, and his hard-on gained rigidity. He pulled her close and she wasted no time in grabbing his underwear, yanking it off, and latching onto his cock with a firm handshake grip.

"Mmm," she moaned. "I've been thinking about this all day."

Then she was riding him, leaning back, her hands on his shoulders, eyes closed, and the wafting vapor masked the age in her face, nearly masked her face entirely, allowing Luke to conjure memories of old girlfriends in their best props to keep himself hard as he undulated his hips, found a rhythm, and worked to ignore her simian grunting.

The climax took him by surprise, happily, and he savored it as she leered at him, knowing it was now time for some quid pro quo. With practiced grace she lifted herself out of the hot tub to plant herself on the deck, legs spread, and again that look of greedy expectation. Luke girded himself, took hold of her thighs, zeroed in on the target, positioned his face a couple inches from her crotch and began to run his tongue over her female terrain.

Pace yourself, pace yourself...there, work it right there, she's making the seagull noise! Seagull noise is good, pig noise is bad. Oops, there's the monkey sound. Find the mound, find the mound! Seagull again...now the loon. When she hits whiny puppy, jackpot! Here it comes, here it comes...!

Indeed, she sounded like an eight-week-old Labrador pup pining for teat as she threw her head back and squirmed in his grasp, adding that final and definitive exclamation point of gas rasping through her sphincter.

Luke submerged himself in the hot tumult of water, the chlorine burning his eyes, and he wondered if the neighbors could hear them like this in their primal lasciviousness, or see them through gaps in the poorly trimmed hedge.

Not that he gave a shit, really. This was her house, her spa, her life. He was just the perpetual guest with an artful tongue.

## ***

# Chapter 8

Her son Daryl dropped in that Sunday morning because he needed money and breakfast. He came with his stunning new girlfriend, Shana, who Luke had met briefly the week before when they'd swung by to pick up his mail.

They were watching TV with Brit when Luke and Peggi got back from a quick hike up the Backbone Trail in Will Rogers Park. As they traded hellos, Luke found his eyes gravitating to Shana reclining on the loveseat in some tight cutoff jeans that showcased her amazing brown legs.

Daryl had met her at Santa Monica College where he was struggling to build his credits in computer science and she was studying acting or dance or both. She had her long black hair in a ponytail and was wearing some ethnic embroidered blouse that de-emphasized her outstanding chest. Her face was her finest feature, small and petite and defined, a mix of Indochina genes from her mom and a White dad who she didn't know, according to Daryl.

"We saw a rattlesnake on the trail," Peggi was saying to them as she poured some Kona coffee beans into the Braun grinder and pressed the top down.

Shana said something but the machine's noise masked it.

"What was that, Shana?" Luke barked quickly when the coffee grinding stopped. He was pulling some mugs from the dishwasher and snatching glances at those legs.

"I said my brother was bit by a snake once, an adder."

"Wow...really. Those things are lethal, right?" Luke padded forward, anxious to engage her.

"Yeah, about ninety percent of the time. He survived, but was sick for a really long time."

Peggi asked everyone what they wanted for breakfast and Britney clamored for a spinach omelet. Daryl wanted bacon and Shana said fruit would be fine for her. But she said it to Luke, not to Peggi. Luke found himself fixated on her and she didn't flinch. This linkage lasted a couple seconds until Daryl said something to her about going into Peggi's study to burn some music CDs.

Luke turned away and realized he was short of breath. Shit, was he having a heart attack now? Great, what a way to impress his stepson's hot girlfriend, with a massive myocardial infarction.

Peggi said something to him from the fridge. "...the spinach is totally wilted. Luke, did you hear me? I need you to run to the store. Sausage might be good, that chicken-garlic from Gelson's...."

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "I'll go, I'll go."

Yes, he went to Gelson's and yes, he walked out of the supermarket with a bag of fresh spinach. But no sausage. He went back in, bought it, and realized he couldn't get Shana's face out of his head. She'd planted something there with that two-second stare, a synaptic loop that played over and over and over again, making him seriously disoriented.

After eating in relative silence while the ladies yammered about skin care products, Luke cleaned up the kitchen. They went outside to sit in the white Adirondack swing hanging from the porch rafters and he kept sneaking looks outside as he scrubbed, trying to catch glimpses of Shana's face through the window.

Daryl loped in wearing some earplugs connected to his iPhone.

"Hey Luke," he shouted over the music in his head.

"Yeah!" Luke chirped back.

Daryl pulled the earphones out. "Have you heard the new Bed Puppets album? I just downloaded it."

"No, not yet."

"Dude, you gotta check it," he declared in his nasally affected voice. "Sample this track...it totally rocks."

He held out the earphones.

Luke put them on and heard a short riff that reminded him of Soundgarden's earlier stuff off "Bad Motorfinger." He'd always enjoyed the hard rock, grew up with Led Zeppelin, Mountain, Thin Lizzy, and UFO, and he tried to maintain a bond with Peggi's oldest kid by showing interest in any new bands who might crank the same sounds as his faves.

"I like it," he said, "yeah...kick-ass."

"I can cut you a CD. I'll put some Jizz Monkies on it, too."

"Ooh, love the Jizz Monkies."

Daryl appreciated the effort Luke made to relate to him, and he suspected that his mom's husband wanted to become something of a pseudo-dad, it being no secret in the family that Daryl's real father, Dr. Deter Geist, a high-profile neurologist with an addiction to pain pills and Scotch who practiced out of Cedars-Sinai, considered his son something of a pariah and a loser.

Peggi knew better, of course, and constantly exhorted her son to improve himself, to grow out of the slacker reputation he'd worked so hard to create in high school. He claimed to be taking some tough computer courses in the hopes of someday building a website with the same global impact as Twitter, Facebook, and e-bay. That's why she kept writing him checks between his jobs at Starbucks, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and most recently, a Best Buy store where he'd just been fired for habitual lateness.

"How's your tennis game these days?" Daryl asked casually as he went to the fridge to grab a Coke.

"Uh, not bad...I just played yesterday. My serve was off, but I was volleying..."

"We should play again," he said assertively. "I had fun last time."

Sure, maybe he did have fun that day last summer, but Luke got tired of having to fetch the balls Daryl kept hitting over the fence, and apologizing to nearby players for his overt grunting every time he swung at the ball.

They drifted outside to where the girls were laughing about something under the Wisteria vines and Peggi stood abruptly as Luke sat in a lounge chair facing Shana on the swing.

"We need to make a Costco run, hubby."

Luke rubbed his face and was in no mood for the consumptive chaos of Costco.

"No, uh uh," he blurted. "Not today. I, uh...I wanted to..."

"Don't tell me you wanted to do your stupid blogging..."

Shana leaned forward. "You have a blog?"

The smile came spontaneously. "Yeah, I do. It's called 'Mandrake's...' "

"Crap! Mandrake's Crap," Peggi laughed, one of those adolescent guffaws that punctuates schoolgirl cliquishness. "I'm sorry, hubby, that was mean of me."

Luke glared at her and had an impulse to slug her in the arm.

"It's actually not bad," Britney volunteered. "It's about the war...you know, in Afghanistan."

"It's about that, and other stuff," Luke added.

"I'd like to read it," Shana said. "I love reading blogs. I started a blog myself but didn't have the discipline to keep at it."

"It's not that hard," he said indulgently, "once you get past all the distractions."

Peggi gave him her catty F-U face and he winked at her.

Twenty minutes later they were in his truck driving down to the Costco mega-store in Marina del Rey, and she was pouty again.

"She appeals to you, doesn't she?"

Peggi rarely played the jealousy card but sometimes she surprised him with her reaction to any behavior she considered flirtatious, usually at the AA meetings they attended together on Wednesday nights.

"I dunno what you're talking about. I was just being polite."

"Yeah, right. You should've seen your face. I wanted to take a picture of it and post it on one of those sex pervert web sites."

"That's bullshit, darling. What about my face?"

"Just the way you were smiling...grinning. Like some pubescent schoolboy fondling himself under his desk."

She giggled at her own graphic simile and Luke fought the urge to utter a loud and cathartic GO FUCK YOURSELF!

"Sure, she's cute...but not my type," he said instead. "I enjoy making love to my wife, aw-right?"

Luke grabbed her bare left leg and she squealed.

Crisis averted, for now.

## ***

# Chapter 9

As a struggling actor in what seemed to him now like a previous incarnation, Luke put on a one-man show called "Bitch-Slappin' America," with a character named Cap'n Salty who wore Army camo fatigues, jack boots and a green beret. He was one of five characters Luke assumed in the show he financed and produced himself back in the late 90s, to tepid reviews in all but _L.A. Stage Forum,_ which gave him a "Critic's Pick of the Week" nod.

"I just don't see how folks can deny the fact that Americans love the violence," Salty brayed at his gradually dwindling audiences in the 45-seat theater. "I mean, shit, just turn on your TV, watch some football, go to a movie, read the news. My own mama, a god-loving Christian woman, used to hunt deer with my dad. And when she couldn't shoot a deer, she'd shoot rabbits. She'd say to us kids, 'Gonna go kill Bugs Bunny today,' and my sister would cry...."

He considered it his shining moment as a writer, as an actor, as a committed and struggling Hollywood wannabe. The show ran for four weeks, people laughed at his jokes, sighed at his irony, and a few even cried at the story about his dying grandpa who confessed on his deathbed that he was probably gay.

But by that time, in the days before the new millennium, Luke was already in trouble at his day job as a marketing specialist at Westwood Business College, after a bovine IS manager named Tulin accused him of being slightly hammered in a morning strategy meeting. And he was. The slide continued for another year, frequent and debilitating benders pushing him to the brink of termination and eroding his goals to succeed as some kind of writer/actor/megastar.

Stints in rehabs followed, along with a few family interventions, and not until a couple years after 9-11 could Luke share with his peers at AA meetings that he was committed to staying sober. Through all of it he'd managed to keep the day job, a situation that had given him the schedule and freedom to pursue his extravagant dreams, and a place that now embraced him as a sober, reliable, and usually punctual web content editor.

His boss, Dr. Brenda Ennis, a buxom ex-dancer from Vegas who went back to college and got her Ph.D. in art history, gave Luke the autonomy he needed to maintain his sanity while he teamed with others in the marketing department to ensure a vibrant web presence for the school's successful online MBA program.

That special Monday morning in early March when Luke's world took such a bizarre and unforeseeable turn began routinely enough with his letting the cats out at five, followed by some blog-writing to polish the Sgt. Gutter piece he'd started on Friday, serenaded at just after six by the plangent sound of Britney peeing into her bathroom toilet almost directly over his head as he sat at his desk.

He heard Peggi in the kitchen just before seven and decided to get proactive.

"Hey, darlin'," he said, coming up behind her in the kitchen as she filled her heavy white diners mug from a Melita-brewed carafe of fragrant Kona.

"I didn't hear you get up," she mumbled.

"Well that's a good thing, isn't it?"

She looked at him, her face puffy, cheeks red, and Luke thought maybe she'd been crying. "I'm going out to the Valley this afternoon so you'll have to make dinner. Pocahontas had an episode, apparently, and Sharon wants me to come to the house. Normally I wouldn't but she's my oldest client...and the only one who pays me on time."

"Okay, sure, no problem."

"Try to vacuum the living room, if you get a chance. I found another fur ball under the sofa."

"Sure...will do."

Peggi wasn't a morning person, especially on Mondays, and Luke was in no mood to provoke a conflict. Instead, he went upstairs to shower and when he came down dressed in Dockers, a white Polo, and a tan blazer, he found Peggi on the loveseat watching a local news segment featuring some guy with a moustache in a dark suit standing at a podium festooned with microphones.

" _At this time, we do not have enough information or evidence to conclude that these two incidents, on the Two freeway in Glendale and the Fourteen freeway near Palmdale, are the work of a single gunman, or sniper,"_ the guy on TV was saying.

Peggi glanced up at him. "I want fish for dinner. Go to the fish market, get some swordfish steaks...and that tartar sauce I like."

"Sure," Luke said, his eyes still fixed on the TV.

" _We can say conclusively that two of the victims were fatally shot, and that the third victim died of his injuries in the resulting vehicle rollover. We urge all motorists to be alert and cautious on the city's streets and highways, but there is absolutely no reason for panic or anxiety as a result of these apparently random acts of violence...."_

"What time you think you'll be home?" Luke asked her, moving towards the French doors to bring the cats in.

"Mmm, seven-thirty or so. I'll call you later. And don't forget to vacuum."

"Sure thing, darlin'," he said perfunctorily, and when he went outside an odd thought invaded his head:

I wish she was just gone.

## ***

# Chapter 10

Normally Luke worked with two other people in the web content unit of the WBC Marketing Department, their three "cubies" segregated from the rest of the spacious seventh floor office maze by a sizeable conference room and the copy area dominated by a long, squat Canon machine.

Kristina Blatt handled the design and layout of the website and worked three days a week while she attended law school part time and ran marathons on weekends. Jason Karbelnig, a pear-shaped dude with a jowly face and thick red hair, had solid HTML skills, wrote copy as needed, and clandestinely composed movie screenplays in the office, certain that his big-time Hollywood career was just a couple "FADE OUT"'s away. Luke, having worked there almost fifteen years now, had informal supervisor status but they all reported to Brenda, who in turn reported to Dr. Gil Doogin, a wispy manager with a background in programming who had a habit of hiring hot college interns and harassing them for lunch dates.

The buzz around the office centered on WBC's upcoming "Technical Management Conference," a five-day compendium of seminars at the nearby Brentwood Diplomat Hotel costing mid-level managers and executives about $3500 to attend a slate of mini-courses with titles like "Becoming a Manager of Excellence," "Negotiating Sensitive Situations," "Transforming Concepts into Innovation," and "Influencing Without Malice."

While the TMC had been a major cash cow in the past, current enrollments were stagnant. With the Conference only six weeks away Brenda had come up with some ideas for a viral marketing campaign that had now become Luke's domain; essentially, writing a series of catchy blogs and ads to post on popular business resource sites.

Much of the work had been done, enrollment numbers had improved by ten percent but Dr. Chuck Andrews, WBC's VP of Academic Programs, wanted another round of "that viral crap" in the next two weeks to reach a base enrollment number of 150.

Which meant another strategy meeting that Monday morning, some brainstorming, and tedious web surfing to pilfer ideas and trends. No way could Luke leave early to squeeze in a workout at his gym before heading to the fish market. Unless, and this occurred to him as he maneuvered his truck through dense Westside traffic on San Vicente that morning, he bought the swordfish steaks at lunchtime and brought them back to the office where he'd keep them in the frig until he left at five. He could work out for 90 minutes at Bel Air Body, sweat the marital angst out of his system and be home by seven to start dinner.

The Santa Monica Fish Market wasn't too crowded just after 1 p.m. and Luke bought three thick swordfish steaks, Peggi's "to-die-for" tartar sauce and a pound of fresh, cleaned scampi that he could sauté up as well, a little surprise for the ladies. The rest of the afternoon went by fast, especially after Brenda left early due to a "family emergency," and he and Kristina talked about her dating situation for an hour.

He liked Kristina, an athletic woman in her mid-20s with a nimble mind, a devotion to running, a sick sense of humor and a face that reminded him of a young Jackie Kennedy. He even fantasized about her a couple times while putting it to Peggi, imagining her in that short pleated skirt she wore every now and then, braced on her desk with her legs pointed skyward as she begged him to nail her.

"I don't want to come on too strong, you know, but he said he likes it when I text him. We texted each other during 'Bachelor Pad.' You think that's weird...a dude who likes to watch that shit?"

Luke pretended to think about it, although from what he knew of this Isaac guy he didn't like him and thought she should be going after more macho types, not bookish doctoral students in Middle-Eastern studies.

"Yeah...I do. This guy speaks Arabic, right? Is he a Muslim?"

"Nooo! Hardcore yid, all the way. Yarmulke on the Sabbath...can quote stuff from the Torah and the Koran. Not to mention Old Testament homilies."

"Mmm...handy," Luke smirked. "I'd be careful...sounds a little, you know...fluffy."

"No, he's not that. We've messed around a little...very hetero. And hung." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "Like a _kielbasa_ , you know? Thick...." She brought her thumbs and forefingers together to give him a graphic sizing and Luke let out a laugh.

"Wow, really? Guy's a freak."

"Not to this girl...uh uh!"

She laughed and changed the subject when Jason came over to update the synopsis of his current script, about a double-amputee serial killer who also happens to run a prominent charity for disabled kids.

"I'm guessing you've got a hot lady cop as the protagonist," Luke said as he stood up to fetch something from the laser printer ten feet away.

"No, in fact, here's where it gets really twisted," Jason droned. "The hero is this little boy with autism who's actually a savant...who helps this fat black FBI dude track down the killer."

"I like it," Kristina tittered, "but a fat black cop could be seen as, uh...insensitive, you know? What about a Japanese cop who does sumo wrestling on the side?"

Jason shrugged. "Yeah, that might work. But it's not a comedy. I want it to have the same suspense buzz as _Silence of the Lambs,_ you know?"

"Can't wait to read it," Luke mumbled as he sat down again to proof his tracking report.

"Well in five weeks you can. That's usually my M.O. when it comes to a writing a script, four if I'm really into it."

"Four weeks," Luke muttered. "It took Hitchcock and Lehman a year to write _North by Northwest._ "

Jason glared at him. "So what's your point?"

"My point? _North by Northwest_ is a great frickin' movie." Luke asserted.

"I thought it was dumb," Jason said, retreating, and Kristina rolled her eyes.

## ***

# Chapter 11

After nearly an hour of cardio work on the bikes at the gym and a good twenty minutes of pushing iron on the machines, Luke came home to find Britney eating string cheese and watching a DVR recording of "Dormies" in the family area, her usual routine after she'd finished her homework. She hadn't changed yet, was still in her school uni, and Luke did a double-take on her smooth white legs dangling over the side of the BarcaLounger.

_Dude, don't go there again,_ he told himself.

For a few months last year he'd found himself fantasizing about her, creating unwholesome scenarios in his mind of banging his stepdaughter while having sex with his wife, and the accruing guilt over such taboo vignettes began to affect his sleep patterns. Not only that, he thought Brit might be having similar ideas about him until that bad scene on Christmas morning when she told him to his face how cheap he was, how his gifts totally sucked, and that for all his faults as her natural father at least Deter had some class when it came to buying stuff for his family. That terminated Luke's unwholesome fantasy life and he was almost relieved that he and Brit had re-established the mutual disrespect that had colored the first year of his "home invasion," as she called it.

"Hey Brit," Luke chirped. "How was your day today?"

"Okay," she said, keeping her eyes on the TV.

"Do anything fun?"

"Not really...school stuff. Mom said you were cooking fish for dinner."

"Yeah," he said, pulling the tightly wrapped swordfish and scampi from the fish market bag and holding them up for her inspection.

"Got some great swordfish steaks and a special treat..." he said almost boastfully.

"Awesome. Just don't overcook it like you always do."

"No...no way...not tonight," he snorted and went into his study to let the cats out.

His "Whole Lotta Love" ringtone bleated and when he saw Peggi's name on the Nokia screen he went out to the back porch.

"Hey, hun, what's up?"

"Ah, I'm running sooo late. I'm on the 405 now, traffic's horrible. I probably won't be home until closer to eight."

"Sorry to hear that."

"I'll call you when I'm ten minutes out so you can put the fish on. You got it, right?"

"Yes, darlin', I got the fish."

"I'm charging Sharon two-hundred for this visit, that's for damn sure."

"As you should."

"Okay. Britney home?"

"Yeah...she's here."

"See you soon."

She disconnected. Up until about six months ago, she'd usually say "Love you, sweetie...bye bye." Then, after a particularly ugly fight on her birthday, also over a "shitty" gift Luke had bought her, she'd become more abrupt on the phone.

Luke went back inside to tell Brit dinner would be late.

Then he hunkered down in his study for a solid hour of blogging.

***

# Chapter 12

Shit's getting bad here, Martha. We hump all the effing time and I'm hauling about 500 7.62 rounds which is like wearing a 30-pound dumbbell on my back. But the worst was when my platoon sarge, SFC Costigan, took one in the head last week from one of our Afghani back-shooting allies. We were setting up over a village to catch some AAF in the act and Costigan went to tell the MF's in the ANR OP that Americans were in the neighborhood, and some Gunga Din asshole just picked him off right in the face. All the guys in our squad saw it and then those so-called friendlies just dropped their guns and took off. We've made a blood pact to kill every one of those bastards if we ever find them, even if it means a court-martial....

It was nearly 7:30 when Luke took a breather from his new Sgt. Gutter post, he was really into the flow and wanted to keep going but he had to get dinner started.

He had a special way of preparing the fish, soaking it in a marinade of milk, fresh dill, and a little salt and pepper for an hour before broiling it. He preferred frying it in peanut oil with a light bread-crumb crust but Peggi and Britney eschewed the fried foods so he broiled it. They also liked to complain about how he always overcooked his fish but that was only because they totally freaked when he undercooked it.

Peggi had a thing about yams, she craved eating them like they were the staff of life, and virtually every dinner had to have a yam in it, either mashed, or baked, or even just raw in a salad. Tonight it was swordfish, scampi, microwaved yams, some steamed broccoli, and a cucumber-cilantro salad that Luke had developed over the years, easy to fix and tasty as long as he used those English hothouse cucumbers.

Britney pecked the keyboard in Peggi's office as he went into the family area, found the DVR remote and flipped on the KNBC news that he recorded every night, local and national. Within seconds he heard, "Hey Luke, can you turn it down, please. I have to finish this paper."

"Sure, Brit...will do."

He turned the volume lower, went back into the kitchen, washed the yams, stuck them in the microwave, turned the fish in the marinade and cut up the cucumber and cilantro. At the cutting board he heard something about "breaking news" and glanced at the plasma screen.

A helicopter shot of a freeway and a tanker truck on fire, cordoned by smashed and blackened cars. Flames and smoke billowing. Over the shot, the graphic "Major Accident in the Sepulveda Pass—Tanker Truck Explodes on 405 Freeway."

Something either expanded or contracted in Luke's esophagus and he froze at the counter, his eyes fixed on the screen. He could barely make out the words from the busty anchor woman, _"...at about 6:15 this evening. As you can see, there are many vehicles involved...."_

Luke went to the TV, stood three feet away and stared at the tableaux being shot by a helicopter circling high overhead, with a PIP-cam shot of the pilot, Mike Wade.

" _Emergency teams are just now arriving on scene, Jennifer, and we're getting reports that the tanker was about half-empty, or half-full, depending on how you want to look at it, so that's about 4500 gallons of gasoline or jet fuel, we're not sure. We're also hearing of several fatalities, including the truck driver, but that has yet to be confirmed...."_

Luke switched to a Laker game with the volume on mute and went back to the counter.

"Shit," he muttered to himself. He'd had a similar premonition before, the day his father passed, a sudden and spontaneous force that compressed everything, made the world denser and opaque.

He reached into his shorts pocket and withdrew his cell as he walked out to the back porch. The evening air had turned cooler, heavier, as he stared at the screen and one-dialed Peggi's cell. It rang. And rang. And rang again before going to voicemail.

He sensed pressure, visceral, as if he were about to belch, only no air came out.

He spoke with some effort and left a terse message: "Hey hun, just, uh...give me a call when you get this...thanks...bye."

She's fine, he mumbled to himself. What're the odds? Ten thousand to one? A hundred thousand? A million to one?

He stuffed the phone in his pocket, went back into the house, made the dressing for the cucumber salad: some plain yogurt, a little mayonnaise, a dash of chili powder, garlic salt. He glanced at the microwave clock—7:53. Around eight, she said. She'd call when she was ten minutes out, she said. Brit's voice startled him.

"When's mom coming home?" she shouted from the study.

"Uh...anytime now!" he yelled back.

_I'm lying,_ he thought to himself.

"I'm getting hungry."

Her declaration sort of hung there as Luke couldn't help but insert his imagination inside Peggi's car as that tanker truck blew a tire and careened out of control, whipping into her Prius, knocking it sideways. Then, like a movie, in slo-mo, that huge chromium tank leaning, tilting, slamming down on top of her and splitting open, hundreds of gallons of cold petroleum distillate dousing and drowning her a second before igniting....

_Shut up! Shut the fuck up!_ He nearly said it aloud, he was so agitated now.

It's a waste of time, wondering, speculating. Part of that came from his time in Alcoholics Anonymous, he was supposed to live everything one day at a time and "in the moment." It was all in the hands of our higher power, right? Can't worry about the future because the future's just another distraction.

_But this is the present,_ Luke told himself. _This is really happening._

Britney started talking, laughing, and he could tell she was on her cell with a friend. Peggi was worried that Brit could develop brain cancer from being on her phone so much. She ran up the stairs, still giggling, and he checked the clock again—8:04 p.m.

He went to the TV and found four other local stations with similar coverage, helicopter shots of the Dante-esque inferno billowing up into the dusk sky accented by the strobing blue-crimson lights of emergency vehicles while thousands of cars sat in what had become a mile-long parking lot in both directions.

Brit came down the stairs in some tight white Juicy sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, her hair up, and Luke deftly switched back to the Laker game.

"So where the heck is she?" she grumbled, going to the frig, finding some mini-carrots in the crisper drawer and munching one. "She's not answering her cell...kind'a weird."

"I know...but she does that sometimes. Sometimes she forgets where she puts it, even in the stupid car. Remember when she lost it under the seat for a week?"

Brit brushed past him and went into the family area. "I know...she can be pretty ditzy sometimes. Mind if I watch TV?"

"Uh, actually, yeah, I'm kind'a into the game."

She faced him, rolled her eyes. "Fine...I'll just go check out some porn online then."

"You're kidding, right?"

She didn't answer him, marched through the door into Peggi's office. Less than a minute later: "Oh my gawd!"

Luke stared down at the swordfish steaks in the black Pyrex bowl and didn't look up when she ran into the kitchen.

"There's been like a huge wreck on the 405 freeway! She takes that one all the time, right?"

"Really?" he said.

"Can you call somebody, Luke...like the police or somebody...to find out if she's..." Her voice wavered, on the verge of whimpering.

"Brit," Luke said, moving towards her, uncertain how to control what was clearly the first stage of teenage hysteria. "She's probably caught in that traffic jam. I mean, cars aren't moving at all..."

"Then why isn't she calling us...or answering her cell?"

She cupped her phone again, punched in Peggi's number, began to cry openly on hearing the voicemail message, then went out to the porch to call somebody else.

After a minute she ran back inside and upstairs to her room.

Moments later Mary called his cell and he answered.

"Hey Mary...yeah, I know, I know.... No, I've been trying, three or four times, no answer, just voicemail.... I know she is...I know.... Right, okay, yeah, I will, of course.... Okay...okay.... Right, okay, I will...thanks, Mary.... Right...bye."

" _Call the police now,"_ Mary had just told him. _"You need to get information,"_ she'd said.

Mary, Peggi's closest friend, the rich-bitch expert on everything who Brit called anytime Peggi wasn't around and Luke failed as a pseudo-parent.

He needed to eat. Luke's own prescient dread and Brit's emotional paranoia had triggered an appetite, and he wanted to eat something. Screw it, he told himself. Much ado about nothing. Peggi was going to pull into that driveway in about an hour and wail about the eternity she'd spent on the freeway with a dead cell phone.

He went to the frig, found a russet potato in the vegetable crisper, washed it off, poked a few vent holes in it and popped it into the microwave next to the yams.

_Baked Potato._ The obvious button to push.

He poured some peanut oil into a pan, found the breading mix and pulled the largest swordfish slab from the marinade bowl.

Ten minutes later he was having his dinner at the kitchen table when Britney came in holding her cell with both hands as if it were some holy relic. She stopped at the threshold.

"You're eating? At a time like this?"

Luke swallowed and faced her. "I'm hungry."

"I called the Highway Patrol. They set up a hotline for the accident but they have no information yet. How can you eat now?"

"I told you, I'm hungry. Peggi's fine, I know she is, and her cell's probably dead. She'll be here anytime now."

"AND WHAT IF SHE ISN'T!" Britney screamed. "WHAT IF SHE'S FUCKING DEAD NOW!"

She let out a sob and ran back upstairs.

"So what if she is?" he heard himself mumbling.

Remarkably, he'd fried up the swordfish perfectly and shoveled another succulent chunk into his mouth.

## ***

# Chapter 13

Some of those commuters had to wait nearly four hours to get off the freeway.

They'd extinguished the blaze and in the aerial shots from multiple helicopters only white smoke and steam wafted into the zigzagging spotlights, the crash zone looking more like a bomb crater, with blackened debris and yellow sheets strewn in a ghastly ellipse near the freeway's center divider. Under those tarps, the grotesque carbonized remains of human beings, Luke imagined.

The surrounding commuter snarl was gone and only the emergency vehicles, a dozen or so, stood in a cordon around the scene. Luke sat in the loveseat and stared at the plasma screen, jumping from one local station to another, listening to the anchor babes chirping about this "horrible traffic tragedy" on the 405 freeway.

"... _at least seven confirmed dead..."_

"... _more then twenty people injured..."_

"... _more than thirty vehicles damaged or destroyed..."_

Britney stayed in her room and he could hear her on the phone, bleating and whining and crying and screeching at whomever she was calling.

At 12:55 a.m., a vehicle drove slowly past the house, slowed, stopped in the middle of the street, backed up, and parked. Luke could see this through the muslin curtains hanging in the formal dining room which had a bay window opening onto Finch Avenue.

His heart thumped in his chest and his mouth went dry. He got up and traipsed through the kitchen, the dining room, and reached the curtain. Pulling it back, he saw a squat man and matronly woman getting out of a compact Chevy with a "City of Los Angeles" seal on the door. They stood on the sidewalk for a moment, glanced at the house, chatted briefly.

Luke had kept his clothes on, Dockers cargos and a green polo, anticipating that he might have to drive somewhere, or receive guests. He was right about the guests.

He heard Britney pad down the stairs but when he peered into the hallway he didn't see her. She waited in the dark.

The doorbell rang.

Luke hesitated, let a wave of dizziness pass, went to the front door.

The first thing he saw was an ID badge from the L.A. County Coroner's Office pinned to a brown blazer. The man wearing it had a moustache, a doughy face, and thick brown hair that was probably a toupee. The chunky Black woman behind him had on a blue business suit, was also wearing an ID badge.

"Hello," he said in a slightly quavering voice, "my name is Alex Roth...I'm with the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office."

Luke fixated on him, kept his hand on the door jamb to steady himself.

"Hi," Luke mumbled. "The Coroner's office...."

Roth glanced at the clipboard he was holding.

Luke could hear Britney working to stifle her hacking sobs behind him.

"Is this the residence of Margaret Anne Geist?"

"Yes," Luke said softly. "Yes it is."

"Are you...Mister Geist?"

"Yes...no. I'm mister...I'm Lucas Mandrake...her husband."

Luke wondered if they could see his chest oscillating from the pounding inside, or his hand trembling.

Roth cleared his throat. "Yes, well, I'm very sorry to have to inform you of this, Mister Geist...Mandrake...but we believe your wife, Margaret Geist...was...was fatally injured in an accident...a major traffic incident on the 405 Freeway that occurred late this afternoon. We have a record of a 9-1-1 phone call coming from a Britney Geist at this address, so we assume you...your family was aware...."

His words trailed off as Britney screamed. "NO! NO! OH GOD NO!"

Then things started to fragment as Luke went to console her and she ran, stumbled, crawled through the living room while that woman at the door offered to provide "on-site grief management."

Luke could hear himself reacting. "No, no...please, just...where...where is the body? What...how do we...."

Roth said some things about needing to obtain dental records and only having Peggi's Vehicle Identification Number, how Luke needed to coordinate with a mortuary tomorrow to claim the remains, and other shit Luke couldn't process because Britney was going into what appeared to be convulsions.

Then the woman was helping him with her and saying they should probably call paramedics and Luke told her, no, please, just leave and I'll handle this, over and over again until they finally _did_ leave and Britney staggered up the stairs where she ran to her mother's bed and hollered "Mommy, mommy, mommy!..." and cried for an hour until exhaustion kicked in and she passed out.

## ***

# Chapter 14

Daryl stayed at the house for a few days after Peggi's death and seemed lost in his own style of grieving that included playing Minesweeper and Free Cell on the computer for six hours at a stretch while downloading random tracks into his iPod. Or he'd meander around the back yard with his cell phone and a Bluetooth plugged into his right ear as he yammered to friends about the lawsuit he intended to file against Union Oil Company for not fitting their tanker trucks with bullet-proof windshields.

Because it wasn't just some random, happenstance tire blowout or idiot traffic move that caused that oil tanker to smash through the freeway center divider and plow into nine oncoming cars—Peggi's being one of them—before exploding. National news reports were now saying that the driver of that truck had been shot in the face by a large-caliber rifle which caused his head to explode, thereby losing control of the truck. Shot by some kind of sniper, according to these same sources.

Luke had called his office early that Tuesday morning and left a voicemail message that his wife had been killed and that he wouldn't be coming in for a while. Brenda called him back a couple hours later and blubbered about how sorry she was for his loss, what a terrible tragedy, take as much time as you need, that sort of thing.

Deter had come to the house just after 8 a.m. to pick up Britney who was now virtually catatonic. Being a doctor, he had access to some quality sedatives that would keep her quiet and comfortable for a few days. And they had what Luke considered an amicable conversation considering their past history of nearly coming to blows at Britney's eighth grade graduation over a minor comment Deter made about Luke's cheap shoes. They threw some clothes in a suitcase for her and Deter said he'd be in touch as they drove off in his silver Mercedes SL350.

Luke spent an hour on the phone talking to Peggi's brother Trevor about a memorial service after the cremation, the cremation itself, and the execution of Peggi's convoluted will which would be tedious, at the very least. Then he made calls to some names from Peggi's address book, informing friends, cousins and distant relatives that she'd died tragically in a horrific car crash caused by a sniper. He also posted a notice on his Facebook page, brief and to the point, that his wife was now deceased.

Then he called Mary.

"Mary...Mary, please, let me say something. Please. I know there was some confusion about whether she wanted to be buried or cremated, and she made no stipulation in her will, apparently. But there really isn't much of her to bury. They need dental records to identify her!" (Luke had been tempted to go to the L.A. County Coroner's office to view the body but that Roth guy had advised against it—"You don't want that image in your head for the rest of your life," he'd said.)

"My god, Lucas...my god." Mary cried a bit on the phone, told Lucas how close they'd been since high school, how wonderful their friendship had been, and after about fifteen minutes of this Luke had to make up an excuse to disconnect.

"Uh, I have people at the door, Mary...from the Coroner's office."

And yes, they had come back for a follow-up visit but not at that particular time, Roth and his lady partner getting Luke to sign some forms and do what they called "a closure interview." Luke never bothered to invite them in, they conducted all their business on the front porch so he could get them the hell out of there.

At some point a couple days afterwards, Luke walked down to Santa Monica Beach and strolled in his bare feet for three hours, up along the wet sand to the Jonathan Club and down to Santa Monica Pier, then back, mild waves churning in short-lived sets under patches of wispy fog while seagulls cawed and Hispanic children splashed in the water with their clothes on.

He turned stuff over in his head about why he felt so detached from everything, so numb, so distant. He knew all about the five stages of grieving—denial, anger, confusion, no, debate, no, bargaining, that was it, depression, and acceptance. But there had to be more: dread over dealing with her estate issues, guilt over not crying or showing public displays of gut-wrenching grief, and annoyance at having to listen to long litanies from friends and family about what a caring, elegant, bright and loving woman Peggi was.

Luke knew what kind of woman she was. They'd been together for nearly five years, three of them married, and he knew exactly what kind of woman Peggi was. A woman he'd stopped really loving about a year earlier, after a week-long quarrel over health insurance. The bile that had flowed from her mouth—"You deceitful asshole!"... "You self-serving bastard!"... "You intentionally let the Blue Cross lapse so you could save a few pennies with some shitty HMO. What a niggardly, small-minded douche you are!"—was at times so foul and relentless that Luke could scarcely mount a defense. After which, he simply saw her differently. In a different light. A fluorescent light that had revealed her deepest flaws.

That's what bothered him most. That only in the dark emotional morass of her death could he finally admit to himself the gnarly truth of their emotional entropy, the two of them struggling to stay in the marriage to avoid the stigma of failure.

Yes, Peggi was dead. As dead as she could be. Burned to an unsavory crisp, along with six others trapped in their vehicles. And only a month earlier she'd been saying how she needed to upgrade her will, and was weighing the idea of converting it to a living trust. But she hadn't. All Luke knew was that she'd inserted a specific rider in the document after their marriage that said if she should predecease him he could stay in the house as long as he wanted, whether the kids moved in or not, and that provisions would be made to ensure that the monthly mortgage nut of $3500 was covered.

But covered how? Was Trevor even competent enough to execute her substantial estate? Based on the flippant estimates she gave him every now and then, and his casual perusal of her Fidelity portfolio statements, Luke figured she had about $480,000 in liquid assets, accrued from her divorce settlement with Deter and a hefty inheritance from her lawyer father. The house was worth another mill-and-a-half, and she had some pricy jewelry in a safe-deposit box worth another hundred grand or so. And of that two million dollars, Luke was assured a roof over his head and not much else. Other than his take-home pay from Westwood Business College, about $2900-a-month.

Then, strangely, staring out at the rolling waves that conjured rainbows in the salty mist, he thought about Shana.

She'd been there that morning, at the house, bubbling over with condolences and sorrow, and Luke wanted to tell her hey, enough already, I get it, you're sorry Peggi died. But it was more the outfit she was wearing, some thrift-store jumper dress with a short hem that showed off her silken legs. Luke had been spellbound.

What was she, half Black, half Filipino? He recalled how guys would tell him, during his stint in the Naval Reserve, that Filipino girls were genetically wired to fuck your brains out. And she was Black, too. In college Luke had dated a Black girl a few times, Eugenia, until she got a tad too dominant both on the street and in the bedroom. But the sex had been great for a month or so, anyhow.

When he got back to the house around noon he let the cats out of his study and realized that never again would he have to worry about fur balls on the floor and cat barf on the carpeting.

## ***

# Chapter 15

" _The Los Angeles Police Department announced today the formation of a joint task force with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department to investigate recent shootings on the city's major highways that have now taken the lives of twelve people and injured dozens more. While he admits to having few leads in these attacks, Captain Dennis Fuentes, the task force spokesperson, said in a press conference they are confident the shooter, or shooters, will be identified and arrested soon...."_

—Maria Delgado, KXLA "Five Live at Five"

Mary took charge of Peggi's memorial held on a Saturday two weeks after her death and about a hundred mourners showed up at the St. Matthews School chapel to offer condolences. Both Britney and Daryl had attended the private Catholic elementary school tucked into a verdant canyon off Sunset Boulevard not far from Peggi's house, at Deter's insistence. Peggi herself had developed a strong ambivalence towards Catholicism in recent years, calling the religion "cultish and corrupt."

Luke didn't have to do much, really, except wear whatever sorrow he could muster on the sleeve of his only Brooks Brothers suit and chat solemnly with anyone who approached him in the unusually large and ornate school facility.

Monsignor Sheffield, an acquaintance of the family whom Peggi had worked with on the school board a decade earlier, gave a brief rhyming eulogy that sounded more like a rap song. Then about a dozen people got up to the podium to share their tributes to Peggi who now rested comfortably in a rosewood urn that reminded Luke of a duckpin as it sat among a flourish of wreaths and flowers underneath a beach picture of the entire family that a semi-lucid Britney had managed to pick out the day before. After weeping at the podium for nearly two uncomfortable minutes she tried to recite Peggi's favorite Yeats poem in her black Eliza J chiffon sleeve dress, but faltered halfway through and nearly collapsed until Deter rushed to the dais and propped her up.

Daryl told a funny story about a terrified Peggi climbing the trail to the summit of Mount Whitney on her hands and knees and when she reached the top doing a "Rocky" dance that nearly sent her over a 3000 foot ledge.

Luke had spent the morning rehearsing his eulogy in front of the bathroom mirror, naked, and thought he'd mastered it more or less until he got up in front of the group and felt more naked than he had that morning. He stammered a bit and was intentionally brief as he glanced down at some index cards that he'd worked up.

"I, uh...these past two weeks have been very difficult for me, as you can imagine," he said in his best actor's voice, as if he were giving some stale monologue from an obscure art house play. "Peggi and I were married just over three years ago and it feels like only yesterday we were honeymooning in Costa Rica and settling in for a wonderful life together here in Pacific Palisades. I've come to know and love her children from a previous marriage, Britney and Daryl, and I've gotten to know many of you at social gatherings and functions. I could stand here and tell you countless stories of Peggi's lust for life, of her loving commitment to her family, of her generosity in the community, and of her quest for spiritual enlightenment. But hey, we all know about that, right? What I will tell you is what she revealed to me in our spa just a few weeks ago, as we enjoyed some special time together after a hard week of work. She said that when she was a little girl, she read something by a man named Gandhi that shaped the way she wanted to live her life. It went something like this: 'You have to do the right thing, every time. It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You may not see the result, you may not have any fruit, but you still have to do the right thing, every time. Because if you do nothing, there will be no result.' That was Peggi, always working, trying to do the right thing, for the world around her, for her family, for herself...."

Mary had hired one of the priciest caterers in Beverly Hills for the reception at her sprawling Tudor-style mansion in Santa Monica, on Georgina Avenue about five blocks from the ocean. Virtually everyone who attended the service showed up for the food and the open wine bar and Luke lamented the fact that he was sober and couldn't let himself indulge in a few glasses of the cold Beringer chardonnay they were pouring. He did go back for thirds on the food, however, and gorged himself on prime rib sandwiches, an excellent _paella_ , and a couple savory slices of cheesecake.

He chatted with Trevor briefly who showed up with yet another in a string of artificially endowed beach blondes, his singular type, named Tiffany, and they talked about setting up a meeting to discuss "that mindboggling will," as he called it.

But it was Luke's encounter with Shana that highlighted the day as she meandered through the crowd with and without Daryl, talking occasionally but mostly absorbing Mary's plush flower garden and her cactus patch, and loitering by the Spanish-tiled pool in her simple gray suit and a black ladies Stetson.

In his aviator sunglasses Luke drifted over to her from a brief conversation with Peggi's cousin Alicia and felt slightly self-conscious about his distended belly. She stared down into the blue water as if looking for something.

"Have you tried the cheesecake?" he asked her.

"No, not yet. I'm still digesting the crab cakes I scarfed. What a beautiful home she has."

"Yeah...nice."

A wave of guilt washed over him and his heart drummed. Did it seem weird, he wondered, standing next to this gorgeous girl at his wife's wake, hitting on her, in fact, when he was supposed to be immersed in some kind of spousal grief?

"Can I ask you something, Shana? And please don't take this the wrong way."

She glanced up at him, squinted from the afternoon sun on her small face. "Well, ask me, and we'll see how I take it."

"Did you like Peggi?"

She blanched, looked off, made an odd sigh. "Wow...that's some question."

"Yeah. I just...I dunno. I talk to all these people, and everyone's so complimentary... praising her accomplishments, and piling on the..."

"Shit?"

Luke smiled. "Yeah. I mean, I knew her as well as anybody, and she wasn't...she didn't..."

"She didn't like me with her son," Shana said flatly. "That was obvious. She hated it, in fact. 'That girl of color' she once told him. Daryl sloughed it off, but I know it bothered him that she couldn't accept me. But I'm over it. Especially now that she's...you know...gone."

"I kind'a had that feeling when we all had breakfast that day, but I wasn't sure."

"The other thing is...well...nevermind."

"No, please, talk to me. Say something honest. I'm so tired of all the sad platitudes today."

She faced him briefly, waved at somebody behind him, began to back away.

"I'll be honest with you some other time. I have kind of a headache and I'm ready to go."

She smiled, turned, and Luke couldn't help but zero in on that amazing ass of hers as Mary startled him from behind with a somber, "How're you holding up, Lucas?"

He turned, focused on her, embarrassed, yet had to suppress a laugh at her skewed, quizzical face that turned the make-up around her green eyes into a Byzantine mosaic.

"Fine, Mary, I'm fine, really. I feel like Peggi's here, among us, loving all of this..."

"Of course she is," Mary said, hugging him abruptly and pushing her massive boobs into his palpitating chest. "Peggi lives in all our memories...and that's something we should all cherish."

Luke eased away from her and nodded.

"Yes...the ghost in the machine," he said.

## ***

# Chapter 16

The following Monday, as Luke Mandrake ran some errands and took a 9 a.m. meeting with Marissa Strauss, Peggi's slim and fashionable attorney, a female Black driver of a short yellow school bus traveling eastbound on the 101 freeway near Thousand Oaks was struck once in the face with a .50 caliber bullet, spraying blood, bone and brain matter onto the faces of a dozen special needs kids.

Amazingly, the bus continued to travel in a straight line for nearly a mile on the busy freeway before hitting a guard rail and slamming into an overpass abutment, seriously injuring five of the children, including one little Down Syndrome girl who captured a large fragment of the slug in her right shoulder. Yet miraculously, only the driver was killed.

That night, as he waited for his Stouffer's lasagna to bake in the oven, nursing a near-beer on the loveseat with Exene on his lap, Luke stared at the plasma screen while William Jennings, the deliberate mouthpiece for the NBC Nightly News, led off the broadcast with an account of the school bus assault:

"... _The driver, Winona Bush, a 42-year-old mother of two, was killed instantly as the bus bounced off a guard rail and careened into a freeway abutment. Just hours later, Captain Dennis Fuentes of the newly formed Southland Sniper Task Force issued a statement confirming that the attack was related to three previous freeway shootings over the past month, and that it was most likely the work of the same person or persons. At the same time, the California Transportation Authority, or CalTrans, estimates that overall freeway usage in Southern California has decreased by nearly ten percent in the past week...."_

Luke stared at the images on the screen of the crumpled bus, of Captain Fuentes at the podium, of a svelte blonde reporter standing on a high freeway overpass with cars speeding around her. Barely two weeks earlier his wife had been killed by this same "Southland Sniper," less directly, perhaps, but murdered nonetheless. And he was still shooting people. Single shots from a .50 caliber rifle. Selective. Truck and bus drivers. From distances of up to half-a-mile, maybe more, they calculated.

The Southland Sniper. That's the best they could come up with? Okay, there was the Manson Family, the Hillside Strangler, and the Night Stalker, media monikers assigned to L.A.'s most notorious killers. They called Muhammad and Malvo the Beltway Snipers, and Charles Joseph Whitman the Texas Bell Tower Sniper. Maybe Southland Sniper wasn't so bad after all. The beeper sounded on the oven and Luke gently lifted his lethargic cat to the floor where she stretched and yawned. Zoomer, the hefty Siamese mix, stood at the French door mewing to come in. Luke opened it and the cat bolted into the living room.

That's when he found himself crying, as if he'd swallowed a pill that'd just kicked in. A sensation consumed him, an amorphous grief that blindsided him. The stuttering sobs came from some forlorn sense of abandonment, or victimization, or both. No more nooky in the spa, no more caressing in the loveseat as they watched the nightly news together under that hideous knit comforter she'd bought in Sedona, no more dinners at chic Italian restaurants when she looked almost glamorous, no more petulant whining, no more make-up sex on the living room sofa, no more trips to tropical climates where they'd snorkel in translucent waters for hours and drink virgin pina coladas.

He moved to the oven, extracted his steaming food with mitts, and let the salty tears stain his cheeks. He dropped the plastic tray on the counter as the moment paralyzed him and he braced himself. Shit, was he about to faint? His heart raced and he struggled to focus on those kitschy spice containers Peggi had bartered for with a persistent street vendor in San Jose.

Yes! Full-on fucking grief. Finally! Bring it on, he told himself. Let if flow, the sorrow. Cry, Lucas, cry! He DID care about her, his murdered wife. He missed her, he wanted her there now to share this slimy meal with him, and he was redeemed.

After a few minutes of this happy despair he took his dinner to the table and reveled in his catharsis. Perhaps it was then that it sounded, the clarion call to a firm and manly reaction to the malevolence of unprovoked sniper attacks on innocent people like his wife. Not loud, however, really more of an echo, as he immersed himself in his food and refocused his attention on the morbid news reports of violence and mayhem from around the globe.

## ***

# Chapter 17

As much as he wanted to stay out of the office another week, Luke forced himself to go in on Wednesday, seventeen days after Peggi's death.

He dreaded those weird, hangdog stares and gratuitous smiles he knew he'd get from everyone in his department, the same looks they gave him after his father died, then his mother. And yes, Gil and Brenda and Kristina and Jason and Mindy and Zahra and DeShaun all tended to look at him as if he'd just had some horrible plastic surgery done, and said the kinds of things that normal people say when addressing someone who's just lost their spouse to a gruesome sniper attack:

BRENDA: "Oh Luke, I can't tell you how sorry I am for your loss. I know how difficult these times can be. Was Peggi actually shot, or...if you don't mind my asking? I put some things in your IN box, but please don't feel pressured to deal with them today...."

GIL: "It's a terrible thing, Lucas. Terrible. My grandmother died in a head-on collision with a train and I was devastated. You must be devastated...."

MINDY: "Hi Luke, welcome back...my condolences to you about Peggi. Really. Here, give me a hug. Let me know if I can help you at all today. Oh, I left a galley on your desk, for proofreading...no biggie...whenever you can...."

ZAHRA: "I sent you a card, Luke...did you get it? You must be really sad right now...I can get you a latte at Starbucks later...my treat!"

JASON: "Sorry about your wife, dude. I suppose you're still fairly bummed out, eh? There was a movie... I can't think of the name of it now, where a sniper terrorizes New York City for months. I actually wrote a script about a sniper, this ex-SEAL guy who dresses up as a woman, lives in the woods and eats worms...."

DeSHAUN: "Hey Luke, so sorry about your loss. Just curious... did you have to, like, go to the morgue and ID her like they do on CSI?"

KRISTINA: "You doing okay, Luke-mon? Can I do anything for you? I just hope they find that asshole sniper and blow his effing head off!"

He finally got to his cubicle, dropped into his chair and saw the stack of backlog paper in his IN box. He stared at his black monitor screen for a full minute before firing it up and going through about 500 e-mail messages, most of them junk. A couple hours later he composed the following message that he sent out just before lunch:

Hello Fellow Staffers...

Thank you all for your heartfelt e-mail's and personal expressions of condolence regarding the recent tragic death of my wife, Peggi. As I cope with her loss, I am committed to returning to a normal life and supporting my two stepchildren as they struggle to overcome their profound grief.

At this time, I would ask that you please refrain from asking me about the circumstances surrounding her passing, and also that you restrict your condolences to today. It will help me immensely if we all simply focus on our work at hand and look forward to the continued success of our courses and programs.

Again, thank you all for your kindness and support.

— _Luke_

He gutted out the rest of the day until 5:15 when Brenda urged him to knock off.

"Luke, please don't feel obligated to come back here before you're ready," she was saying in one of her odd gypsy outfits. She gave him what she probably thought was a compassionate smile but what seemed to him more of a condescending simper.

"I'm not," he asserted. "I can grieve while I work."

She wasn't sure how to take that and turned on a heel.

"Okay, then I'll see you tomorrow. Have a good night...."

I can grieve while I work. Nice homiletic comeback, he thought to himself as he drove home. Hell, he can grieve while he works, while he eats, while he craps, while he watches a Lakers game. That was the thing about the grieving process, how personal it could be, how private, and how it really didn't have to be a process at all but moments that intruded into his otherwise normal routine. He'd grieved for his dead father, his dead mother, and yet he went on with his life, played tennis, worked his job and wrote his blogs. Did this mean he was some kind of sociopath who wasn't somehow emotionally incapacitated by his mourning? Fuck no. It meant he was tough, and strong. It meant he was a man, a guy who knew how to get on with it despite the pain. At least that's how he spun it, in his mind.

He saw Daryl's black POS Honda Civic parked in the driveway and muttered "Shit!" to himself. He'd have to park his truck on the street, which irritated him, and he wasn't in any mood to deal with his stepson.

He entered through the front door and winced at the throbbing riffs of a Jizz Monkies song. Or maybe it was Can o' Kickbutt, the other band Daryl was so fond of "ripping" into his iPod. He saw the mail on the floor from the slot in the door and gathered it up before going into the kitchen, dropping it on the counter and opening the fridge to find a Beck's near-beer. He let the cats out and found Daryl sitting at Peggi's computer in her office, his arms flailing as if playing some ethereal drum kit, the music blaring through tinny speakers.

"Hey D-mon, how's it hangin'?"

"Whoa!" Daryl turned abruptly in the chair and nearly fell out of it.

Luke reacted with a laugh. "Sorry, dude...didn't mean to startle you."

"Luke, where you been, bra? Got some new J-Monkies tracks I wanted you to hear."

"I went to work today...to catch up on shit."

"Yeah, I know what that's like."

He turned the speakers down as Luke went to the French doors to watch Exene chasing a butterfly around a dead rose bush. "Have you talked to your sister lately? How's she doing?"

There was an aroma in the air, vaguely pungent, unmistakably pot, and Luke wondered if it was coming from Daryl's clothes or if he'd actually fired up a blunt in the house.

"Yeah, we kicked it yesterday for a while. She's, uh...she's coping, you know. Dad's got her on some Prozac or Zoloft...she's barely functional, but went back to school this week."

"Good," Luke said absently, "that's good to hear."

"Dude, uh," he said with a minor stammer, "I'm wondering if maybe you got, you know, a minute to rap?"

Luke didn't look at him but kept his eyes fixed on his cat. "Rap...about what?"

Daryl put his elbows on his knees, assumed a serious mien. "Uh, well, I dunno if you know my situation, down at my crib in Venice, but, uh, well...things're kind'a tight. I've been workin' hard at school, you know, but my job situation..."

Luke knew where this was going and he closed his eyes. The thought had occurred to him already a few days ago, in the shower in fact, that Daryl might challenge him with this scenario, and bingo, here he was.

"...and so I thought I might, you know, move in here for a while...crash in Brit's room until, like, summertime."

Luke processed his options. Any wavering or hesitation would show the actual revulsion he felt over the prospect and until things became clearer with the resolution of Peggi's will he might need Daryl as an ally in a potential probate showdown with Trevor.

Then he thought about Shana and how she would most likely spend more time at the house if Daryl was living there.

"I don't see a problem with that," Luke heard himself saying even as his stomach tightened. "You sure Britney's cool with it...the idea of you staying..."

Daryl cut him off. "Oh yeah, we worked it out. She's staying with dad until the end of the school year, so, like, she's totally cool with it."

"Okay, so when might this happen then?"

"Tomorrow?"

Luke faced him. "Sure, buddy, sure. Just a couple rules-and-regs I need you to follow. No ganja in the house...period."

"Oh, hey, no prob..."

"And when I'm here, noise levels stay low. Like, wear your phones whenever you..."

Daryl grinned and turned his chair back to the computer.

"Absolutely, Luke-mon. I knew you'd be down wid it. Hey, we'll have a blast!"

He made a show of plugging in his Bose headphones, turning the room silent, and after a gratuitous "thumb's up" to Luke, went back to ripping his Jizz Monkies.

Luke left the room, padded through the family area and stepped outside to sit in the porch swing. He stared at his arthritic old cat, her black fur matted due to geriatric ennui, as she sat on the flagstone deck near the spa and stared back at him.

He'd need to call his sponsor Colin again, to discuss some accumulating hostility about, well, everything. Accept life on life's terms, wasn't that one of the mantras he'd inculcated in the earliest days of his sobriety? Living life in the moment?

Running away was not an option. Not anymore. He'd done that too often in the past, with nominal results. No more fleeing from the unpalatable portions of his life. He would work through this, live with his step-son, perform his job functions, get back to blogging. Yes, that was it. He needed to find solace in the adventures, or misadventures, of Sergeant Gutter again. Immerse himself in creative and constructive criticism of our country's wayward foreign policy through the eyes of his plagiarized warrior.

Yes!

Then he had a thought that virtually exploded the synaptic tranquility of the moment:

Fuck Sergeant Gutter! Write about the Southland Sniper instead.

## ***

# Chapter 18

Before that second Friday in April few people had ever heard of Joaquin Ruiz outside of his mother, his dead father, an obese sister, a criminal brother, and the people he worked with as a security guard at Kensington Metals Recycling in Burbank. He was 26 years old, of Guatemalan descent, five-and-a-half feet tall and wiry at 150 pounds, narrow features, and a full head of thick black hair cut in a stylish fohawk.

His only real friend, a scrawny second cousin who worked as a residential gardener in Glendale, would say later that Joaquin was often sullen and withdrawn, except when he talked about guns. He owned 19 of them. And wanted more. Revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, hunting rifles, but mostly assault weapons, some of which had been modified to fire automatically, including a compact Colt M4 Commando AR-15, and his prized Heckler & Koch 416 "10", the most lethal in his arsenal. As this second cousin would later tell reporters, "He always loved his guns. They were like his girlfriends, the way he talked about them."

On Tuesday Joaquin was fired from his security guard job at the recycling yard for taking another unauthorized day off the previous week (to attend a gun show, as it would later be revealed). He did not tell his mother, Esmeralda, about the dismissal, but pretended to go to work the next two evenings, and got up earlier than usual to "do some errands," he told her. In fact, as numerous news outlets would report, he was buying ammunition from various gun stores in the San Fernando Valley.

Early Friday morning at breakfast Joaquin seemed unnaturally talkative and his mother considered this strange. Stranger still was his outfit, a navy blue serge suit, the best he owned, a starched white shirt, and his favorite purple tie. "I have a job interview," he told her, and this made her happy. She knew he'd hated his security guard job and she'd prayed that something better would come along. She would subsequently tell investigators how for this "interview" he toted a large black satchel that seemed awkward to carry.

Joaquin left his apartment and drove his silver 1997 Honda Accord to the grimy fenced lot of Kensington Metals Recycling where, with a glossy black Smith and Wesson Model 29 .44 magnum handgun he shot and killed three people in an isolated prefab office among piles of twisted steel and aluminum: Hank Papadakis, his former supervisor; a young Hispanic phone receptionist named Maria who had spurned his many advances; and a Black truck driver everyone knew as "P.J." After covering the bodies in tarps and locking the office door, Joaquin climbed back into his car and navigated to Central Valley City College in North Hollywood where two years earlier he'd attempted to earn an AA degree in police science and failed. It was just after noon.

He parked his unwashed car about 50 yards from an area known as the North Campus Food Court and, according to eyewitnesses, walked calmly in his navy serge suit and heavy black bag towards the eatery now packed with lunchtime students.

Having been a student at the college for nearly three semesters, Joaquin knew the food court well, a place where he would loiter for hours and attempt to initiate conversations with the many young coeds who congregated there. He was especially aware of the fact that there were only two main entrances/exits into the courtyard which contained "The Sand Shack," a walk-through kiosk where you could order deli sandwiches and salads, and about 25 bench-seat tables under multi-colored umbrellas. Two hedge-covered cinderblock walls, a long line of vending machines and the adjacent structure of Cooper Hall created an effective enclosure about a hundred feet square.

At seventeen minutes after noon, Joaquin Ruiz entered a men's room at the north end of Cooper Hall, took his black satchel into a stall, deftly pushed his Smith & Wesson Model 29 into one trouser pocket, a Taurus 24/7 OSS 9 mm 18-shot semi-automatic pistol in his belt, packed his lightweight HK416 under his left arm and his trusty AK-47 with extended 40 round clip under his right, said a soft prayer to himself, and exited the stall, walking past 20-year-old Kenny Gulbranson who was peeing at a urinal. Gulbranson would later tell reporters, "I was takin' care of bidness, you know, and the dude walked right by me. Then I heard the shooting and ducked into a stall. He could'a done me right there...but he didn't."

Joaquin took ten steps to the threshold of the northwest entrance to the food court where, according to survivors, he braced the assault weapons on his hips and unleashed a stream of bullets across the entire width of the quad.

Survivor Ellen Marquez told an _L.A. Times_ reporter, "At first I thought it was like a helicopter flying really low...until I heard screaming. And then something hit me, like being punched in the arm. Then I saw the blood, you know, and people falling around me, and, like...I knew it was bad."

A couple male students attempted to rush Joaquin as he replaced the spent clips in his machine guns but he yanked the Taurus semi from his belt and shot them both numerous times. Using only the HK416 he continued to fell the terrified students who had stampeded towards the southeast exit in their attempts to flee.

Another survivor, 22-year-old Trent Coleman, described it as, "Just this wholesale slaughter, you know. After he shot those two dudes he reloaded that machine gun and just, like, went to town on everyone at the exit. It was like watching a balloon deflate...they all just collapsed, you know."

A campus security officer, Reginald Walker, heard the mayhem from his patrol car, unholstered his black Browning 9 mm and ran towards the food court but was unable to enter from the southeast and could not see the assailant until he was struck in the neck by a stray bullet. He did not survive.

What happened next was especially disturbing to the seven witnesses who, despite various wounds, managed to live through the attack.

"I knew I was hurt bad but I could see him, just walking, you know," said Elaine Gutierrez, a 21-year-old design major from Burbank, "and he was yelling stuff...bad stuff, like 'Shut up, bitch!' or like, you know, 'Eff you, asshole!' and then just, like, shooting them in the head. Just walking, you know...and yelling...and shooting people in the head."

Four minutes into the assault, 39 students lay dead or dying in the food court and Joaquin Ruiz was almost out of ammunition. After laughing at a young woman who pleaded for him to stop, then shooting her in the face, he dropped his Smith & Wesson on the ground, turned and started back towards his car while in a nearby parking lot, two campus police cars and three LAPD cruisers screeched to a stop and attempted to assess the exact nature of the crisis. Later, one of the officers would write in his official report, "I saw the perpetrator walking towards his vehicle but was unable to ascertain if he was in fact the shooter, due to his professional appearance and since his demeanor appeared to be calm and detached. I believed at that time that because he was wearing a pressed suit he did not fit the profile of a mass murderer."

Joaquin got into his Accord and attempted to leave the campus when another LAPD cruiser maneuvered to block his exit. So he veered sharply to the left, drove over a traffic island, accelerated quickly, and exited the campus on Oxnard Boulevard, leading police on a short high-speed chase that ended when he crashed his car head-on into an oncoming LA Metro bus at nearly 80 mph, killing the driver and three passengers instantly. And himself. This brought the day's death toll to 47. Two more victims would die in area hospitals over the following days.

With his melee on that Friday afternoon and his 49 total victims, Joaquin Ruiz entered and took dominion over the pantheon of all time notorious American shooting spree killers, surpassing Seung-Hui Cho and his 33 victims at Virginia Polytechnic in 2007; Adam Lanza's massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, 2012; George Jo Hennard with 24 dead at a Luby's Restaurant in Killeen, Texas, in 1991; James Oliver Huberty's 22 victims at a McDonald's restaurant near San Diego in July, 1984; Charles Joseph Whitman's 14 people from the University of Texas at Austin clock tower in 1966 (Whitman also killed his mother and wife the day before but they are not included in his Bell Tower tally); Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's Columbine total of 13 students and teachers and themselves in April, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado; Nidal Malik Hasan's 13 victims at Fort Hood, Texas, in November, 2009; and James Holmes' rampage at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater in 2012 that took 12 lives.

A day later it would be reported that Esmeralda Ruiz discovered a note her son had left prior to his attack. It said simply:

Forgive me mama.

Life sucks.

I just want to die famous.

Your son Joaquin

## ***

# Chapter 19

Kristina got a news alert on her phone just after 1 p.m. as she was coming back from lunch and stopped by Luke's desk.

"Jeezuz, Luker, did you hear about the shootings?"

He assumed she was talking about the Southland Sniper and another freeway pile-up.

"No, what..."

"Out in the Valley, some guy with assault rifles...they're saying like thirty people dead, at least."

"What?" he said, looking up from the galley he was proofing and focusing on her pale face. "How many?"

"Then he crashed into a city bus and killed more people."

"Good god...no shit?"

Luke pondered the semantic irony of god and shit working together to describe some berserk bastard going on a rampage and killing scores of human beings, horrific on the face of it yet surreal at the same time, like a movie or a video game.

As she headed back to her cubie Luke brought up the CNN site where the sensational headline braced in red filled his monitor screen, "Shooter Kills Dozens in L.A. School Massacre: Los Angeles SWAT Police continue to search the grounds of Central Valley City College in North Hollywood for other possible gunmen in the wake of a shooting spree that has left at least 35 people dead and scores injured...."

Just before five, Brenda swung by his desk in a green pantsuit that made her butt look huge.

"Those shootings today were awful, weren't they?" she said.

"They sure were," Luke answered, giving her a sidelong glance from his station at the computer.

"God, sometimes I wonder where we're headed as a civilization, you know? Such...such insanity. They're saying like over forty people dead from that psycho bastard. Plus, that sniper is still out there. I totally stay off the freeways now," she chirped, moving down the hall.

"Well, try to have a good weekend anyhow," he said politely.

Luke listened to an inning of the Dodger game during his drive home, not ready to absorb the media onslaught of reports, first-person accounts, victim back-stories, and a profile of the gun-toting maniac Joaquin Ruiz. Even venerated Dodger broadcaster Vic Stanley talked about the attack, how awful it was, and how his thoughts and prayers went out to all the families. There was an undertone of resignation in that sage voice, a sadness that tainted our constancy as a people, that this is what we do as Americans, we play baseball and occasionally kill dozens of people in shooting sprees.

So Luke wasn't really prepared for the sight that greeted him at the house as he pushed open the front door, of Shana practically convulsing with sobs on the living room sofa with Daryl and a couple kids he didn't recognize working to console her. The young couple sitting on the settee fixated on Luke as he picked the mail up off the floor and slowly approached them.

"Hi," Luke said lamely. "What...what happened?"

Daryl faced him. "That shooting, at CVCC today. Shana's cousin...she thinks she got shot..."

Shana sat up and screeched the words. "I don't think, I KNOW, aw-right! She always answers her phone for me, always! And now she's not!"

Luke nodded. "Mmm...wow...sorry to hear it. Can I get anyone anything? Water...wine?"

The waifish girl on the couch with bad skin who Luke had never met reacted to that. "Mmm...some wine might be good."

"Sure," Luke said. "I'll open a bottle."

"Something light, like a chardonnay, if you have it," the pasty guy said.

Luke went into the kitchen, took a second to gather himself, found the high cabinet where Peggi kept about a dozen bottles of inexpensive wine for guests and gatherings. He opened a bottle of pinot grigio, got some ice from the freezer, poured it into four plastic tumblers, put them on a serving tray and brought it all out to the living room.

Shana's crying jag had subsided, she was leaning back on the couch, her face pointed towards the ceiling, eyes closed, and Luke set the tray on the coffee table. Acne girl and albino guy reached for the tumblers with no hesitation and after she took a sip she did that coy little shrug that girls do when they want you to think they're just shy.

"Mmm...tasty."

Luke forced a smile. "Glad you like it."

Shana sat upright and turned rigid, as if something had just occurred to her.

"We need to go to the hospital...where they took everyone!"

Daryl leaned closer to her. "We could do that...or maybe they've got some kind of list online, you know?"

"No! I want to go to the hospital!"

Luke was ready to volunteer his services to drive her when acne girl spoke up.

"We can take you...if you really wanna go."

"Yeah, I really wanna go," Shana reiterated.

"Most of them went to Keck and St. Vincent," Luke said, repeating what he'd read on his computer at work.

Shana stood up. "Then let's go."

Acne girl took another gulp of wine as her boyfriend got to his feet.

"Where are they...the hospitals?"

Daryl sighed, pushed himself off the couch. "I can print out a map."

Minutes later they were out the door and Luke stared at the blue cups on the coffee table. He picked one up, held it to his nose. The fragrance brought back a memory, an old girlfriend named Julie who also drank ice cold pinot grigio and liked to blow him every time she got drunk.

He dumped the wine down the sink, found a warm near-beer in the cupboard, let the cats into the yard and sat in the porch swing, his mind swirling around Shana's emotional display. The air was cool, moist, and a gray canopy of fog hung over the neighborhood.

These shootings, he thought to himself, of his wife, and now Shana's cousin, they've hurt me. How many horrific crimes had he seen on the news in his adult life, or read about in newspapers and magazines and online, until he'd become functionally desensitized to their impact on the world, and their tragic effect on families and friends of the victims. Their horror had become an abstraction to him, a Platonic shadow of reality. But now, Peggi's death, and the wounding or murder of Shana's cousin, they were in his house. They'd invaded his space. And this angered him.

Not that he could simply get on a soap box and call out gun owners everywhere as the scourge and bane of our violent culture. He had one, a gun, a silver 9 mm Ruger semi-automatic pistol with a ten-round clip that he'd purchased impulsively at a gun shop after a road rage incident five years earlier. Peggi knew he had it and she even prompted him to keep it near their bed in case of a break-in. The clip was loaded but he kept it separate from the pistol and put them both in his sock drawer.

So what did that make him, a gun-lover? Hell no. Yes, he'd shot guns with his father, and in the Navy, and taken the Ruger out to the desert to shoot at beer bottles and an old stuffed teddy bear he'd stolen from an ex-girlfriend. And yes, he'd enjoyed the thrill of the reports pounding his ear muffs, the loud and fast pops as he jerked the trigger in quick succession, bullets kicking up dirt and glass and cotton stuffing with Peggi looking on and pressing her hands to her ears.

But this. This aberration of taking a small arsenal into a place packed with students and killing so many, of _being able_ to kill so many....

Twenty minutes later Luke sat at his computer scrolling through online news reports of the Ruiz attack and ran across a link to a blog called "More Guns, Less Violence," posted a couple months earlier by some economist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, apparently a player in the gun rights advocacy movement.

How Concealed Handguns Can Save the World

By Dr. Ron L. Mott, Professor of Economics and lifetime member, NRA

Last year, voters in California again rejected a state ballot measure to ease restrictions on permitting and carrying a concealed handgun, emboldening the state's reputation as having some of the most stringent gun-control laws in the United States. Unfortunately, recent statistics released by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, as well as statistical and anecdotal evidence compiled from over 300 journal articles, 150 books, scores of government publications and numerous ad hoc surveys show that while gun control laws look good on paper, there is no empirically proven benefit to reducing the incidence of violent crime by restricting gun ownership and use. In fact, the converse is true: in states with relaxed permitting and concealment laws, statistics show that the incidence of gun-related murders per capita has decreased by up to seven percent compared to states with severe permitting requirements, and the incidence of rape and assaults has decreased by up to five percent for women who carry a firearm. Moreover, it has been shown that a woman who uses a gun to thwart a rape is four times as likely to survive the assault unharmed as a woman who doesn't, and that the incidence of home robberies and invasions in Florida—a state with liberal discretionary concealment laws—are down nearly twenty percent since relaxing its permitting restrictions....

Luke read the posting twice and clicked on an imbedded link, "OpenCarryNow.com" that grabbed his attention, a website with an amateurish layout using misplaced photos of two blubbery guys in their 40s braced by a couple hot babes, one blonde, one brunette, all wearing compact holstered pistols on their belts and apparently disco dancing.

The Truth Behind Open Carry Gun Laws: More than our 2nd Amendment rights!

By Ted Dolf, founder of OpenCarryNow.com and a highly successful prosecuting attorney in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

"Open Carry" is the right of every American to carry in plain sight a properly holstered gun during their normal daily lives. This means a doctor on his way to the hospital; a lawyer preparing for a trial; a construction worker erecting skyscrapers; a mom picking up her kids from school; a teacher standing in front of an unruly classroom; or a college coed out for her daily run. Normal, everyday people, 6 million-plus who hold legal permits to display their willingness to protect themselves with a loaded handgun.

Those who oppose handguns often claim that the Open Carry Movement contradicts the spirit of the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution, when in fact it's the governing bodies of individual states which determine how freely we can own, use, and display our guns. The simple fact is, 29 states DO allow any law-abiding citizen to openly carry a handgun in one form or another, with only minimal restrictions. Moreover, 14 of those states provide for easy acquisition of concealed and open carry permits that give citizens the right to display their weapons in just about any manner they see fit—either strapped to their waist, dangling in a shoulder holster, strapped to their thigh, or even hanging on a necklace if that suits them.

Obviously, this approach to personal protection and civic liberty engenders the argument, "Well isn't this just a throwback to the Wild West and rampant gunplay where gunslingers ruled the day and common citizens cowered in fear?" Hardly. In fact, these progressive laws, passed only within the past few years, indicate a growing respect for the rights of the individual, as opposed to the mass fear and hysteria of the gun-control left, and shows that lawmakers do indeed have the public weal in mind when attempting to balance a citizen's rights against the state's interest in ordered liberty..."

After an hour of internet skimming and scanning, Luke rubbed his face, brought the cats back inside, fed them, fixed himself a turkey burger and turned on the TV.

" _Tonight, Channel Five News has obtained exclusive video of Joaquin Ruiz' murderous rampage at Central Valley City College. Despite being critically wounded and bleeding profusely, student Michael Hutton used his cell phone to capture these shocking images as Ruiz walked among the wounded and literally executed them just before police arrived and he fled the scene. We must warn you that these images are graphic and disturbing...."_

Sitting over his dinner at the butcher block table, Luke stared at the plasma screen, mesmerized by the herky-jerky image of a short man in a blue suit pointing a handgun at a girl on her knees and firing, the image of impact and convulsive reaction heavily pixilated. He could probably find an unedited version on the web right now, he thought, if he wanted to see her head explode.

All the major networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox—kicked off their nightly news broadcasts with the CVCC massacre, how one guy armed with four guns and an automobile killed nearly 50 people in a noontime attack, and how with the Southland Sniper still at large Los Angeles had regained its locus as kook capital of the U.S. Two anchor guys from the major networks actually shifted their nightly broadcasts to L.A. affiliates to give their "on-the-scene" spin of added compassion and concern.

Field reporters gave sordid details of the crime scene, "...a grisly specter, blood and tissue everywhere" was Luke's favorite, and helicopters hovering over the food court showed a patchwork of blue, yellow, and black tarps spread over bodies and gore.

He turned if off and couldn't finish his burger. For a moment he thought he might barf but he didn't want to let himself overreact and then have to clean up the mess. He went outside to breathe some air and after a few minutes he heard a voice in the house.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Daryl flip on the light to Peggi's office and sit at her computer. He was on his cell phone and Luke moved closer to eavesdrop.

"She's in a fuckin' coma, dude. Like half her head blown away. She shouldn't even be alive."

Daryl brought up a Facebook page on the computer but Luke couldn't see whose. He kept chattering even as he typed something. "Shana's a mess. Yeah, they were close...like sisters or some shit like that. The waiting room was like a fuckin' war zone...people screamin' and cryin' an' shit...unreal, man...."

Luke took a few steps and reentered the house from the family room.

He was stuffing what remained of his turkey burger into the garbage disposal when Daryl sauntered in, phone pressed to his ear.

"Yeah dude, I'll hit you back."

He slid the Droid into a front pocket and went to the refrigerator.

"So how's she doing...Shana?" Luke asked him.

"Not so good," Daryl said as he unwrapped a piece of string cheese and bit off a hunk. "Her cuz has major brain damage but the docs think she'll live, if you can believe that shit. But I mean, you know...we're talkin' cabbage on wheels here...if she makes it."

Luke faced him, wanted to say something on the order of _SHOW SOME FUCKING SENSITIVITY, ASSHOLE!_

"Sorry to hear that," he said limply.

"But Shana's tough...tougher than she looks. She was in a gang for a while, in Chula Vista."

"A gang? Really...."

"Yeah. Don't tell her I told you. She even jacked a car, with some friends, if you can believe that shit."

Luke felt his face flush unexpectedly and he turned back to the sink to rinse out some glasses.

"No kidding. This is Shana you're talking about...not the cousin."

"Yeah...no...yeah. They were in it together, the two of them. They went to teen jail for a few months and came out, like, reformed. But don't tell her I told you that...she'd fuckin' kill me."

"Right. No. I...I won't."

A gorgeous reformed gang member, he thought to himself. Luke couldn't get the smile off his face, knowing he would fantasize about her later, perhaps in the shower, and experience a few moments of manly release at her phantom expense.

## ***

# Chapter 20

He cancelled his tennis game with Danny that Saturday morning, said he'd tweaked a hamstring at the gym, and went to an AA meeting instead, the 10 a.m. at the Women's Center in the Palisades where he knew Colin liked to go and ogle all the silicon-enhanced Westside ladies in attendance.

Luke found him in a corner of the modest activity room chatting with Tina, a 40-something semi-hot TV drama producer who'd just relapsed and was weeping into a napkin.

Colin put his arms around her, pressed himself against her and Luke hung back until she peeled away.

"Hey Colin. What's up with her?"

The bearded ex-Brit faced him and shook Luke's hand.

"Lucas, my ram among men, so good you could make it." He put an arm on Luke's shoulder and leaned close. "Lovely woman...and now rather vulnerable. Seems her man, the Lothario lawyer, has just confessed to another infidelity which gave her all the reason she needed to go on a burgundy bender."

"That's a shame."

"Yes, and...," Colin leaned closer, "...that rack is genuine."

Luke smiled. "Really."

"Yes, I just made that determination. Let's grab some joe, shall we?"

Colin led him over to the refreshment table where a giant polished chrome urn had just finished perking. They found suitable mugs among the stack of over a hundred and grabbed a couple cookies each.

"You don't often make this meeting, my friend," Colin said as they meandered towards the large picture windows and scanned the room of mingling current and former drunks, many of them rich and successful and basking in their sober glow.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Luke said flatly. "I, uh...I guess I'm still having issues with Peggi's, uh...death."

"Yes, yes, of course you are. That's to be expected. But you're not...that hasn't triggered any cunning cravings..."

"No, not really. I mean, sure, I think about it now and then. It's just...I have these moments...these bouts of rage that just intrude on my thinking. Especially after what that asshole did yesterday at Central Valley College."

"Oh, god, yes, what a horrible, horrible thing. Janice had a minor breakdown last night watching the news broadcasts."

"My step-son...his girlfriend has a cousin who got shot in the head. She's alive, but barely."

"God, how awful."

"Yeah. Awful. I think it's...you feel so, I dunno, impotent when this shit happens. That's the only word I can think of. Just helpless and immobilized by the insanity of it all. The sniper...now this Ruiz asshole."

But Colin had already locked onto another titillating babe flitting through the crowd, Lori, a petite Black girl with stunning dreadlocks and a flirtatious mane that demanded attention.

"Yes, yes. God she's amazing, isn't she...Lori? I think that's her name."

"Yeah, and she knows it. Total flirt...shallow as hell."

"Mmm, yes...but shallow girls shag with the best of them."

Luke forced a grin, finished his coffee and the meeting began. They found seats near the front and the leader, a tottering guy named Marvin, stood at the shiny wooden lectern on the low stage and asked everyone to take a couple moments of silence to honor the victims of the CVCC shooting massacre. That done, he ran through the usual opening litany, gave out meeting chips, called someone up to read Chapter Five from _The Big Book,_ then introduced the speaker, Courtney M., in her 60s and heavily made-up in a tight black pantsuit.

Luke tried to focus on her melodramatic story themed around guns and violence, how in the middle of a red wine binge years earlier she'd found her philandering husband's Glock semi in the closet and decided to blow her brains out right then and there, but couldn't figure out how to load it and passed out. When she woke up she found herself in a red pool of liquid on the floor and screamed, assuming she'd pulled the trigger and only wounded herself. But it turned out to be just vomit and she broke into a hacking chuckle that cued the audience to laugh along with her.

But Luke didn't laugh. He thought about Peggi, dying senselessly on a Los Angeles freeway, and he clenched his fists under his armpits.

## ***

# Chapter 21

He thought the house was empty when he got home, Daryl's car was gone from the driveway, and let the cats roam at their leisure. Exene walked stiffly, her black tufted fur giving her the aspect of a hedgehog, while Zoomer ran into the downstairs bathroom where he liked to crap in the bathtub if Luke didn't yell at him first.

Then he heard a laugh, Daryl's, coming from upstairs. He herded the cats outside and found the TV remote to check out the Dodger game when Shana's voice startled him.

"Hey, Mister Mandrake."

She padded into the kitchen in jean short-shorts and a sheer blouse, transparent against the sunny window behind her, and Luke's eyes zeroed the silhouette of her perky breasts in a lacy bra.

"Good morning, Shana."

Daryl bounded in behind her and went straight for the refrigerator where he found a couple Diet Cokes and popped the tops on each, handing one to her.

"Hey, mornin' Luke-mon."

Luke went to the counter, found a stale bag of cheddar popcorn and began eating to distract himself from Shana's disarming appeal.

"How was your game...kick Danny's ass again?"

"No, I uh...I went to a meeting instead."

"A meeting...oh yeah, right." Daryl corralled Shana into the family area and guided her to the loveseat. "Luke does the AA thang. You don't mind if I tell her, do you, Luke?"

"No, not at all. It's public knowledge."

Shana looked his way as Luke took a few steps towards them.

"I think that's really cool. My uncle's in AA...says it saved his life."

"Yeah, well, it probably saved mine, too. How's your cousin, Shana? How's she...."

Daryl switched on the TV, scanned through channels until he found the movie they wanted to see on HBO. Shana faced the screen as if annoyed.

"She's dead...but breathing. Brain dead. On a respirator."

Daryl put his arm around her, pulled her close.

"Yeah. Really heavy scene at the hospital last night," Daryl said quickly.

"I don't wanna talk about it." She became inert, staring at the TV screen as their comedy started, and Luke absently went to the frig to grab a near-beer.

"We ordered a pie from Papa-J's, Luke-mon, if you want in on it. I'm a little short of cash but I'll hit you back in a couple when I get some skin from my ol' man. Should be here anytime."

Luke shrugged, knowing he'd be out $20 but not really caring.

"No problem-o, D-mon."

"Cool."

## ***

# Chapter 22

When James Madison crafted his final version of the United States Bill of Rights and presented it to Congress, his overriding concern was to ensure simplicity and clarity. As preliminary drafts of the Second Amendment were first written, pertaining to the rights of Americans "to keep and bear arms" for the sake of a "well regulated Militia," they included such additional provisions as limitations on the kinds of militia under federal control, training of the militias, and the exact nature of state control over the regulation and maintenance of militias. None of these provisions were ultimately included in the amendment, in deference to Madison's expository elegance, and the resulting single sentence, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"—has caused considerable confusion and controversy about our inalienable right to own guns.

While such landmark cases as U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Presser v. Illinois (1886), Miller v. Texas (1894), and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act banning machine guns, have effectively castrated the meaning and intent of federal law to guarantee citizens' rights to own firearms, leaving it up to individual states to mandate their own gun control statutes, it is nevertheless acknowledged, both in a legal and an historical context, that American citizens have the God-given Constitutional right to own and use firearms for their personal protection....

Luke found himself hammering the plastic keyboard of his Lenovo laptop with a fierce intensity. The force, the energy behind the rapid strikes—he could crank out nearly 90 words-per-minute, with accuracy, when motivated—came from someplace deep inside his chest, as if some mutant engorged organ was now pressing against his rib cage like the bellows of a distended accordion.

After scouring a half-dozen websites and perusing a few relevant topics on Wikipedia, he was now composing the mission statement of his overhauled website, morphing it from "Mandrake's Take" to the new and provocative "Gunsanity.com."

A film of sweat collected on his semi-bald scalp and he ran his hand over his head, wiped it on his sweatpants before continuing to compose what amounted to a cathartic rant....

America's gun culture owes gratitude to the many fine men who have advanced the proliferation and status of firearms in this country: Myles Standish, William Kieft, John Underhill, Captain John Smith, William Pitt, General George Washington, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Eli Whitney, Samuel Colt, Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson, John Stuart Skinner, William T. Porter, Joshua Shaw, William Conant Church, George Wood Wingate, Harlon Bronson Carter, and Charlton Heston. These men, along with many other time-honored "heroes," championed the cause of unfettered production and ownership of firearms for American citizens since the birth and founding of our great nation nearly four hundred years ago.

Yet over the past few decades, America's gun culture has come under attack, not only from the radical gun-control left but also from the deranged gun-toting right, from criminals who use guns as extensions of their warped personalities to kill scores of innocent civilians. I'm talking about the Joaquin Ruiz's and Seung-Hui Cho's and Adam Lanza's of the world, people who arm the gun control advocates with the emotional ammunition they seek to severely restrict and control our access to firearms.

The aim of this new web site is simple and direct: to promote a new consciousness of what I call "gunsanity" advocated by gun lovers and owners themselves who want to prevent the kinds of heinous attacks perpetrated by criminals, lunatics, and mentally unbalanced individuals who with their horrific acts tarnish the global perception of law-abiding American gun enthusiasts.

More specifically, I am offering a reward of ONE MILLION DOLLARS to stop the violent freeway assaults being perpetrated by that individual known as "The Southland Sniper," and creating a fund to lobby state legislators to severely restrict the sale of the types of assault weapons—more commonly known as machine guns—used by Joaquin Ruiz in his deranged killing spree at Central Valley Community College.

Please view the video I've posted here and go to my "Contributions" page to make any donations you can afford to help me create a more balanced and restrained gun culture in the State of California...."

The bounty idea came to him abruptly as he breezed through an article in the _New York Times_ archives about the Beltway Snipers, Mohammed and Malvo. Two people split $500,000 two years after the case broke and the snipers had been convicted. The money had come from over 900 donors, public and private, and Luke figured he had as much right to offer a bounty as anyone else, including city authorities and the cops.

But first he'd have to edit the copy he'd just written, procure the proper domain names, build the site virtually from scratch, and shoot and format the video he'd just mentioned. After nearly three hours at the keyboard, and reviewing the diatribe he'd just synthesized from what amounted to a protean passion to just _do something_ , a sensation like euphoria surged through him.

It was Sunday, Shana had spent the night again with Daryl in Britney's room but he hadn't seen or heard them since the day before when they'd shared a pizza and watched some TV together.

Luke took a break, went out through the French doors to the back porch where he found the afternoon sea air refreshingly cool. He sat in the porch swing, watched a few sparrows dousing themselves in the standing bird bath, went over the timetable in his head, and set the following Saturday as a deadline to publish the new site.

He wanted to shoot the video ASAP but needed to think about presentation. He could surely do it himself and his Panasonic mini-DVD hand-held would suffice for the data constraints of the site builder. Yet there had to be a twist, a hook, a gimmick, something that could launch a viral outbreak, a few thousand hits at least, about two minutes worth of quirky bytes he could post on YouTube.

Peggi would approve, he was sure, and certainly support his effort, were she alive. She'd owned guns herself, before she had kids, and enjoyed shooting skeet with her dad as a teenager. Yes, she would appreciate this new effort to validate her death.

Shana's voice broke the solitude.

"Hey, Luke...what're you doing out here? It's kind'a chilly..."

She was in baggy blue sweatpants, probably Daryl's, and wore a black knit sweater over a pink T as she stood near the door.

Luke tensed as he focused on her small brown face. "Naw, it's fine. I'm used to it. I grew up near the ocean."

"Yeah...where?"

"A place called Trinidad, north of Eureka." He noted the puzzled cant of her head. "You know, Humboldt County...where some of that fine sensimilla comes from."

"Oh yeah...sure. Trinidad...like the island."

"Yeah, only it's called Trinidad Head. Like an isthmus. Beautiful beach up there. My dad taught history at Arcata High School. We lived like bohemians for a while until he went into counseling to make more money. Then he bought a house in McKinleyville and I joined the Navy."

Wow, he thought, why the background blather? She made him want to talk.

"Ooo, you were a sailor. I always thought sailors were cool...especially their uniforms."

"Yeah, kind of impulsive. My dad and I got into a big fight and I...I joined. Got the G.I. Bill out of it..."

"I hear that. I've done so much stuff after big fights with my mom...getting high, a tattoo on my...my rear..."

"You have a tat?"

"Yeah...small...a hummingbird with words from a Stevie Nicks song...real bad-ass."

She giggled, took a few steps towards him and relaxed her arms.

"Where...where's Daryl?" he asked self-consciously.

"Ah, he's napping. He usually conks out for a while before dinner...then he's up 'til one or two. Makes it hard on me sometimes."

Luke faced her and had a weird tingling in his glans. She was gorgeous, a doll, the kind of girl, woman, he'd pursued and been rejected by in college, and again after his first marriage died. Exotic, enticing, yet somehow unattainable.

"So how're you...how're you doing now?"

"I'm good. I'm okay. I've been thinking a lot."

"Yeah, me too. You can sit down here...I've had all my shots."

He surprised himself with his forwardness and was more surprised when she padded over, stepped behind the swing and swung herself onto the cushion beside him.

"Thanks. Yeah...I dunno. I've been taking a lot of dance classes but now I'm wondering...I'm thinking maybe I can do more...should do more, you know?"

They were separated by a foot of air, Shana resuming that chilly self-embrace, Luke turning his body and bearing down on her as he reveled in the soft lavender fragrance from her hair.

"More how?"

"Well...maybe like law school or something."

"Law school...wow. I thought about law school, briefly, but it seemed so...so intimidating."

"I know. The idea scares the shit out of me. But it's a way to action...I mean real advocacy, you know? Making a difference. About guns, and violence in this country."

God he wanted to tell her. He wanted to just spill it all right there on the swing, how he'd just spent the entire afternoon composing what he knew could become something big, something viral, something really meaningful to her and her brain-dead cousin.

Not yet, he told himself. Not now. Wait. Make it real first.

"Yeah, I know how you feel. I...I want to do something, too. For Peggi...in her honor." That was a minor crock, but what the hell. It sounded good.

"Do you...do you miss her...your wife? Daryl cries sometimes...especially when he's high. He'll be like laughing at something one minute, then he just starts sobbing like crazy and says how much he misses his mom. It's weird. No, I take that back...it's not weird at all."

Luke took a second to make sure the words came out right. "Sure. I do. I miss her. But I also know I have to move on. I have to grow from this. I have to give it context, and get stronger."

More bullshit, but milder and less pungent.

"Mmm...that's a great way to look at it. I wish I could do that."

"You will. Daryl told me you're tough...tougher than you look."

"Oh, what...my 'history'? Yeah...I was tough for about a year...until my mom moved us up here. Did he tell you about my carjacking?"

She laughed quickly and Luke leaned closer. She didn't seem to mind.

"Yeah, as a matter of fact..."

"He tells everybody that. Like it makes me a badass. I bet he didn't tell you it was my uncle's Mustang that'd just been repo'd."

"No, he didn't get into specifics."

"We'd been drinkin' a little, there were four of us, and Nadine, my cuz...you know...she had the key. We went to the yard, climbed a fence...they hadn't changed the locks yet. She wanted me to drive, and I panicked when the night guard lit us up. Smashed through a gate, messed the car up real good, got chased by the cops for nearly a mile before I hit a dead end."

She let out an odd laugh, put her head down, shivered in the cool air.

Luke's face was now only inches from hers and he nearly succumbed to the urge, to the compulsion, the need to embrace her, make her warm, make her hot, press his mouth to hers. But he stood up instead.

"Hey, let's go inside...you're freezing out here."

She peered up at him and he wondered, shit, did I blow it again, was she waiting for me to move on her?

"That's a great idea. I can make coffee...decaf."

She got up and practically pranced past Luke towards the open doors. He hesitated, let her go inside as he shoved his hand into his underwear to adjust his tumid cock and make his arousal less conspicuous.

## ***

# Chapter 23

He had a light workload that week, especially after Brenda called in sick for three days with "some kind of flu thing," which gave Luke time during his extended lunch hours to work on the new web site from his office computer. He also called Danny on Wednesday to make a special request which took some cajoling.

"Just for a day, dude," he was saying into his Nokia from the open expanse of lawn fronting the Federal Building on Wilshire. He sat on a short cement wall running along a curving walkway, keeping his voice low as small cliques of people in suits made their way towards Westwood to have lunch. "I'm not gonna fire it...I just wanna use it as a prop for a vid I'm shooting."

"But it's not licensed, bro. I bought it at a gun show in Idaho, back in the day, and it's been sitting in my closet for fucking ever. It's worth a shitload, and I can't..."

"Danny, dude...when you see the video, you'll be glad you obliged me."

"Obliged you, huh? Fine. Buy me some fuckin' lunch on Saturday then."

"Abso-fucking-lutely."

Sweet. A Browning Bar MK. II auto-loading hunting rifle with a Bosch scope. Basically, a long-range, off-the-shelf death machine. Designed to bring down elk, moose, and even bigger game like rhinos and hippos, depending on the cartridge. Luke would pick up the weapon after their tennis game and complement it with the old camo uni and the desert digital cap he bought at a surplus store for some G.I. Joe Halloween party and film his video early Sunday morning somewhere north of L.A. He'd have to be careful, find an isolated road with a freeway or major thoroughfare in the background, and make sure there weren't any police helicopters in the area. Maybe around Mojave or Tehachapi, laced with remote back roads and escarpments overlooking the 14 Freeway.

Luke did not fully understand his compulsion to go through with this scheme. Yet he knew he would finish it, for better or worse. Like all the other compulsions in his life that had brought him either exalted satisfaction or abject dejection.

## ***

# Chapter 24

For days the media obsessed over the victims of Joaquin Ruiz' assault and Luke found himself reading through the saccharine web obits of people vaulted into national notoriety through their brutal murders:

" _Bernice Sarkissian had dreams of becoming a dentist someday and was working two jobs to support her ailing grandmother while trying to complete her basic college requirements. She hadn't planned to be at Central Valley City College last Friday but needed to check out a book from the library...."_

" _Donny Schoenberg had just returned from two tours in Afghanistan and had recently been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Still, he wanted to be a school teacher, a dream that would end abruptly with a gunshot to the head...."_

" _Everyone loved Cindy Lindstrom's infectious smile and the way she could just brighten up a room. All she'd ever wanted to do since she was a little girl was to become a professional dancer, but that dream was shattered the instant a bullet severed her spinal chord...."_

The world also learned more about the shooter, Joaquin Ruiz, born in Arizona to illegal immigrants, beaten as a boy by a criminal, alcoholic father, yet acquiring a love of guns from his uncle, a former Marine, who would take him into the desert to hunt coyotes with AR-15s. After his father died in a prison riot, Ruiz's mother moved him to Glendale where she married a truck driver and Joaquin yearned to join the military. But he was rejected for health reasons and this devastated him. After attending CVCC for a year-and-a-half he dropped out and worked a few fast-food jobs until he got his guard license and hired on with Brinks, only to be fired a year later for threatening a supervisor. That led to his gig at Kensington where he put virtually all his earnings into his arsenal.

News reports featured the reactions of local, state and national pols, as well as outspoken celebrities and gun lobby spokespersons regarding pending and proposed legislation to ban or severely limit the sale of assault weapons in the U.S.

" _This latest example of rampant gun violence in Los Angeles involving high-powered assault weapons only underscores the wanton need in this country for a comprehensive law banning the outright sale of such guns!"_

—Senator Frank Dorchester, D, Massachusetts

" _Why the hell does the typical American citizen need a machine gun? I mean really. What, for hunting? Hunters don't use machine guns. They use rifles. With scopes. One shot at a time... boom! Okay, target practice. Let's keep assault rifles legal in America so gun freaks can shred some targets at the range and make alotta noise. Are you kidding me? Really? These things are designed for one thing and one thing only—to kill human beings as quickly as possible. Period!"_

—Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Howard Means

" _Americans need to understand our fundamental rights as citizens of this great country and fight the predictable knee jerk reactions of liberal extremists following tragic events such as occurred in Los Angeles on Friday. It's not as if the weapons used in the attack acted by themselves, of their own volition, with no one to guide them. That's ridiculous! They were used by a human being. A human being who could have easily used a bomb made from ordinary household ingredients, or a sword, or a pack of angry dogs. Let's not forget that he also used an automobile in his attack, which can be labeled as a lethal weapon. You don't hear cries from the hysterical left-wingers to ban cars now, do you? Guns by themselves kill no one! It's people who kill! Criminals! Psychopaths! Deranged malcontents! These are the criminals who we need to legislate against...and enforce the laws against. Keep these violent animals in jail and off the streets! Americans have a constitutional right to own guns, and that includes assault rifles!"_

—Malcolm Roach, president of the National Rifle Association, addressing a gun show audience in Dallas four days after the Ruiz attack

" _Hey, guess what, media muckrakers and pseudo-socialist Chicken Lickens. Our beloved machine guns saved the world from having to learn how to speak Nazi and Jap and kept the commie Kooks in Tonkin Gulf. Oh yeah, and remember 9-11? Thanks to our trusty M-16s in full auto mode, Al Qaeda's got their tails between their legs and running for whatever trees they can find in Af-crap-astan and the Arabian desert shit-scape. So don't blame the weapons! Blame the people! People who kill people need the killing—law of the global jungle, my friends, whether we like it or not!"_

—Ted Bodie, outspoken gun rights advocate and former rock star

After scanning the myriad reports and updates on multiple sites, Luke found the URL to the video he'd posted to ViewTube just hours earlier:

A tall man in desert camos using his open truck door as a brace, a high-powered rifle balanced on the window frame. His angular face reminds us of an actor, Brad somebody, but he's bigger, heavier, like John Wayne. He appears to take aim at cars on a four-lane road below, roughly a mile away, then turns and faces a camera mounted near the rear of the truck.

" _Hey. Know who I am? No, I'm not the guy killing drivers on Los Angeles Freeways. But see how easy it is? Me, with a sniper rifle, in broad daylight? All I have to do is line up a target and bang...pull the trigger."_

He puts the gun down, slides it into the truck, stands and takes a few steps towards the camera. His face is partially obscured from the early morning shadows under the bill of his cap.

" _My name is Luke and I'm a concerned citizen, just like you. I'm tired of feeling victimized by deranged malcontents who kill innocent human beings. My wife was one of those innocent human beings, and her killer, the Southland Sniper, remains at large. And he's still killing people. That's why I've created a web site, Gunsanity.com (the name appears in white letters at the bottom of the screen), to help us stop this senseless gun insanity, or 'gunsanity.'"_

The scene switches to the grounds of the Westside Veterans Cemetery near Luke's office where he's still wearing his camos and standing among a long line of white grave markers on a wide grassy hill:

" _The purpose of this new site is two-fold. First, I am personally offering a one million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest, capture and conviction of the person they call the Southland Sniper. My second goal is to raise one million dollars in contributions to lobby California lawmakers to ban or restrict the sale of assault rifles—what I prefer to call machine guns—in this state, like the kind that were used in that horrible massacre at Central Valley Community College last week...."_

Luke shot the footage himself all day Sunday and spent Sunday night editing it down on the Magix Movie Edit software he'd purchased the year before. It took him another three hours to tweak the site, create the video page, format the comments cache and set up the hyperlinks to the multiple Southland Sniper Task Force tipster pages and hotline numbers. He didn't have the authority or expertise to vet and winnow each potential lead because he wasn't a cop, but he considered it a public service to post the phone numbers and e-mail addresses the task force had created to expedite any information about sniper sightings.

Establishing the 501(c)(3) account for "charitable" donations took him less than an hour through LegalMaze.com, giving his lobby fund tax-exempt status, and for additional credibility he set a donation limit of $250.

Luke did not have a million dollars to back the bounty he promoted. Not even close. Not even remotely close. But as far as he knew, he wasn't contractually bound to issue the money to anyone until a suspect had been apprehended, tried and convicted. And as long as he didn't use the lobbying donations to buy himself a Ferrari or commit any other overt fraud, all he had to worry about was a possible civil suit filed by self-righteous citizens who might feel slighted by his empty offer.

In his mind everything was legit, and he was ready to show the world that he really gave a shit. That he could make a difference.

That he could be a hero, too.

## ***

# Chapter 25

Four days after launching the Gunsanity web site and posting his Southland Sniper Bounty video on YouTube, Luke found about 30 messages in the e-mail cache, including:

Greetings, you IGNORANT PHUCK...

I just saw your web shit and don't really see how you can call yourself a gun-rights advocate when you're asking the pussy-wussy left-wingers to help you ban what you call "machine guns". I say you're just a dooch for not understanding or respecting AMERICAN values and principels. this country was tamed and won-over by guns and now faces the same threats by illigal emmagrants and terorrists we faced 200 years ago with hostile indians and mexicans. God-loving AMERICANS need to protect themselves from any threat of a hostile attack from all the criminels and wetbacks invading our lands and to do this we need the so-called 'machine guns' which our garanteed by the second emmendment in the CONSITUTION....

—Will Kickurass in Fresno

Dear Luke—

Having just seen your web site and the bounty reward you are offering I want to say how noble this is to stop the insane gun violence that plagues our country. I am contributing ten dollars to your cause via PayPal and if I see or hear anything about that evil sniper I'll certainly report it through your site to qualify for the reward money. Since I take the train I feel relatively safe but I still think we should find that maniac as soon as possible!

—Mildred S., Pacoima, CA

Attention Mister Idiot: obviously you don't know jack shit about Second Ammendement rights and the U.S. Constitution. "Gun control" and creating laws obstructing our right to own machine guns is the first step to total government tyranny and a dictator-in-waiting like that Sambo we have running the show right now. Citizens with guns equals negative government oppression. Sadly, assholes like that Ruiz creep ruin it for the other 50 million of us who know how to handle a 60-round clip!

—Clay in Redding

Machine guns forever, dickwad!

—Ace, Riverside, CA

God bless you, Luke, for creating such a nice reward to capture the sniper.

—Mr. Kane

Yesterday I saw a man driving his truck on a fire road above my property and called the sheriff's department. A helicopter flew over about five minutes later and the man disappeared. If they caught him would I qualify for your reward?

—Jimmy Napier, Northridge

Hey dude, sounds like you need some hot T-shirts to promote your cause. Get back to me and let's do business, my rates are 'the best in the west'!

—Bart's RadWear at RadWear.com

enjoyed your vid, 'luke.' nice outfit. sweet piece, the browning. my pop owned one, till he got popped. ha ha. know this - if muhammad and malvo hadn't got careless they'd still be smoke-checkin targets in the beltway. read revelations 9 and know that the time is at hand, thanks to horsemen like me. sic semper tyrannis!!!!!

—pluto

Luke estimated that about 60-70 percent of the writers supported his efforts, lauded the million-dollar bounty and praised his fund to ban assault weapons in California, while the other 30-40 percent expressed their assertive views that God, the U.S. Constitution, and our own history as a frontier nation guaranteed the continued proliferation of rapid-fire killing machines.

What surprised him even more; the 501 account he'd set up had already received nearly $1000 in contributions.

He responded to about a dozen of the most intelligently written and favorable e-mails and amused himself by re-reading and archiving the obscene ones.

That's what he was doing at around 6 p.m. Thursday evening when he heard the doorbell chime go off over the Soundgarden tracks he was playing through the computer speakers. He got up from the keyboard, padded through the living room and reached the front door. Through the peephole he saw three men in dark suits, one with a shaved head, one sporting a Tom-Selleck-esque moustache, the third built like a fireplug.

"Yeah," Luke shouted at the door, "who is it?"

Fireplug guy held up a badge.

"Los Angeles Police Department. Is this the residence of Lucas A. Mandrake?"

Luke opened the door and faced the three men, all stone-faced.

"I...I'm Luke Mandrake."

Fireplug guy took a half-step forward, continued to hold the badge out.

"I'm Detective Holsinger, this is Detective Kangas, and..."

Shaved-head guy cocked his head. "Special Agent Winkle. We're from the Southland Sniper task force."

Fireplug guy reasserted himself. "We'd like to speak with you, Mister Mandrake... about some things that...that have appeared online."

Luke wondered if Daryl was upstairs and if Shana was with him.

"Sure, sure...come on in."

The three filed in almost as if shackled together and Luke had to fight off a disorienting fear that made him backpedal into a side table and nearly knock over a lamp.

The two LAPD guys sat on the battleship sofa while the FBI guy sat in the faux Louis-the-XVI chair Peggi had refinished herself. He pulled out a portable tape recorder, muttered "test" into it a couple times and set it on the glass coffee table while the detectives withdrew notebooks.

LUKE: "Can I get you guys anything to..."

KANGAS: "No, we just need to ask you a few short questions. You don't mind if we record this, do you?"

LUKE: "Uh, well, I'm not..."

WINKLE: "You can sit down, sir. The recording is purely for our benefit...it's not legally binding at all."

LUKE: "Sure, okay. _(sitting in the settee across from the LAPD guys)_ I...I didn't think..."

HOLSINGER: "We just need to confirm a few things before we proceed."

LUKE: "Sure, okay...."

They went over his full name, his contact information, that he'd been working at Westside Business College for the past fifteen years, that he'd been married to Peggi for just three, that Daryl lived at home now and that Britney was living with her father, that Luke owned a Ruger pistol, that he did NOT own the Browning Bar Mark II that appeared in his website video, or any other rifle, and that he had no known affiliations with Al Qaeda, the KKK, the Arian Brotherhood, the Communist Party, and a few groups on the FBI's extensive watch list. Then things turned testy...

WINKLE: "I don't think you appreciate how irresponsible it was for you to post that video online."

LUKE: "Irresponsible. Really. I would think..."

HOLSINGER: "What the hell possessed you to dress up like a whack-o and aim a hunting rifle at freeway traffic?"

LUKE: "I wasn't aiming at anything and the gun wasn't loaded..."

KANGAS: "You realize we have teams in the air with orders to shoot on sight? If they'd seen you..."

WINKLE: "He doesn't need to know that. What he does need to know is that posting that reward was total bullshit. I mean, we're pretty goddamn sure you don't have that money on hand and besides that, you're interfering with an active police investigation..."

LUKE: "Hey...hey...that's not true. I did some research about this..."

KANGAS: "What research? You went online, googled some shit..."

WINKLE: "You realize how much more difficult you've made our investigation? Can you appreciate how many idiots, crackpots and jag-offs are now calling us with bogus tips and info?"

HOLSINGER: "This morning we got a call from a guy who said he was the shooter and that he wanted to turn himself in. We figured it was bullshit but we had to send a SWAT squad to his house in Alhambra. When we got there he said he'd seen your reward online, wanted to turn himself in and claim it. You know what it costs to send a SWAT team into a civilian neighborhood?"

KANGAS: "That's the kind of shit we're dealing with now!"

LUKE: "Yeah, but the City of Los Angeles has its own reward posted...."

HOLSINGER: "Right, and it's strictly promoted and not ballyhooed across the internet like some Lottery payout."

WINKLE: "We also suspect that your efforts to collect what amounts to political contributions without proper IRS and State Comptroller filings may violate Federal mail, wire and internet fraud statutes, which we're currently looking into."

Luke had no immediate response to that and the three men glared at him as if on cue.

HOLSINGER: "Bottom line is, Mister Mandrake, you need to take down the web site and kill that YouTube video so we don't get inundated by the substantial idiot fringe who feed off this shit. It's hurting our efforts to catch this guy."

Luke became acutely aware of the heat in his face and the tension in his neck and hands. He was, in fact, enraged at these imperious assholes working to intimidate him into some kind of capitulation. He stood up and moved to the front door.

LUKE: "Am I being charged with anything now?"

HOLSINGER: "No you are not, sir."

WINKLE: "But you could be...if you're not listening to us."

LUKE: "Okay, thanks. I've listened. Is there anything else?"

KANGAS: "No. We're done here. Aren't we, Mandrake?"

LUKE: "Thank you for your time."

He opened the door and they stood up.

WINKLE: "We appreciate your efforts to help us, Mister Mandrake, but this thing is way over your head."

LUKE: "And apparently it's way over yours, too, since that maniac is still out there."

They didn't say another word. After they filed outside and he shut the door, Luke found himself trembling.

"Joe-Friday cocksuckers," he mumbled to himself and five minutes later he was sitting in the back porch swing in the cool night air nursing a near-beer and marveling at his rekindled determination to stay the course and defy everything those obnoxious bastards had just told him.

## ***

# Chapter 26

" _The Southland Sniper Task Force has issued a statement this morning saying they are currently pursuing active leads in the case but have not identified any suspects after six attacks over the past three months have claimed 19 lives and wounded nearly 30 others. They have also increased the city's reward to a half-million dollars and established another hotline number to report suspicious activity. This announcement comes at a time when private citizens are taking up the cause through social media and even YouTube. Teesa Lambert found a local resident who has 'gone viral' with his own million-dollar bounty for the killer..."_

The shot of Maria Delgado at her news desk cuts to a lithe Black woman in a gray suit standing in front of Luke's house, interviewing him. He's wearing tan chinos, a blue Van Heusen button-down and his favorite herringbone sport coat:

TEESA: "Yes, Maria, I'm standing here with Mister Lucas Mandrake of Pacific Palisades, a web designer and internet blogger whose wife Peggi was one of the early victims of a Southland Sniper attack back in April. Frustrated at the lack of progress in the case, he decided to post a provocative video announcing his own reward for the freeway killer, and to lobby for legislation banning the sale of assault weapons in California. Luke, can you tell us what motivated you to post that disturbing video and create such a hefty reward?"

LUKE: "Uh, well...I'm tired of the total lack of progress from local authorities and government lawmakers in ending these periodic slaughters by maniacs with machine guns."

TEESA: "Okay, but the Southland Sniper isn't using a machine gun, he's using what authorities describe as a military-style sniper rifle..."

LUKE: "I don't care what he's using, you're missing the point. Just about any kook in this country can bypass our pathetic gun-control laws and buy lethal weapons at gun shows and from private sellers. You don't need a background check from a private seller..."

TESSA: "Yes, but it's my understanding that the task force has expressed serious concern over people like yourself taking matters into their own hands, and that they may seek a court injunction to close down 'bounty hunter' web sites such as yours."

LUKE: "Hey, my wife was killed by the Southland Sniper nearly two months ago and he's still out there shooting people. Rather than wasting time worrying about people like me, maybe the Task Force should focus their energies on finding this maniac...."

Luke sat at his computer and watched the video clip on the KXLA web site and then watched it again. And again. He sipped his strong, cream-tainted coffee and basked in emotions he hadn't experienced in years. Not pride or any sense of accomplishment, but more like the afterglow of conquest. A mood similar to the gratification that came after the six-week run of his one-man show 17 years earlier, "I Survived a Marriage," when critics wrote him good reviews and audiences laughed at all the right places. Days after the show closed he celebrated what he considered a major milestone in his performance career by hiking up Mount Langley, the 2nd-highest peak in the contiguous United States, with his friend Mike. The picture hung on his wall, of him at the sunny summit sitting on a granite boulder at the edge of a 5000 foot precipice and beaming with that "I'm-on-top-of-the-world-now!" face.

The Gunsanity web site had been live for barely two weeks and he'd received over 100,000 hits. His 501 fund had grown to over $20,000 and he was getting more money every day. Aside from Teesa Lambert's irksome on-camera interview, he'd done an over-the-phone piece with someone from the _L.A. Times_ that resulted in a fairly positive endorsement of his efforts, posted press releases on request to the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal web sites, and received a call from a guy named Orson who claimed to be a press agent and wanted Luke to sign with him.

Luke went to his e-mail cache loaded with 100 new messages and scrolled through them.

" _You deserve a medal, Mandrake! I'm donating five bucks to your fund. We need more guys like you to take a stand!"_

" _Today I'm driving into the Hollywood Hills and looking for snipers. Better have that money ready—I'm gonna win it!"_

" _Nice going with the web site, Mister Gunsanity, but you're totally missing the point with assault weapons. Every tyrannical government in modern history made sure that NONE of its citizens had guns, and especially 'machine guns'. So in a sense, the collective gun owners in America ARE a militia—ready to fight against the desperate Feds should our economy go belly-up, which it will sooner rather than later...."_

" _You California faggots don't know shit about guns or gun history. We whites won the west and the spics, coons, and redskins are trying to win it back. My M-249 replica (fully auto, BTW, but don't tell the feds that, hee hee) is the ONLY thing keeping me free."_

" _pluto here—saw U on the news. U don't have nice things to say about me. just answer me this in your blog: what's the bigger threat to our global rat cage: the father of ten inbred idiots or some dude with a rifle? think about the bigger picture, bro."_

This was the fifth post from "pluto," all of them personal and infused with a brashness, an arrogance that made Luke uncomfortable. The guy totally identified with the Sniper. Luke wondered if he was in fact...but no. No way. Deranged freeway snipers wouldn't be inclined to risk exposing themselves by sending unnerving e-mails to trending bloggers. Would they?

There was a knock at the study door and Luke jerked in his chair. He glanced at the time on his computer screen—6:45 a.m.

"Luke...it's Shana? Are you awake?"

Shana. He hadn't seen much of her in the past few days and their short conversations had been merely cordial. A quick hello Friday night when she came over, that was about it. He'd thought about her, but all the action with the site and cops and the nascent publicity had put his infatuation on simmer.

"No, not at all, door's open."

She opened it and stood there in a blue terry robe, most likely Daryl's, holding a cup of something hot. Her hair seemed askew, unbrushed, but the overall look knocked the breath out of him.

"How...how've you been? I...I couldn't sleep. Dee's snoring, he always snores after a wild night out."

Luke rolled his chair away from the computer and swiveled around to face her.

"A wild night out, eh. What, you guy's did some partying?"

"Well, he did. My sister's in town, we went to El Coyote and Dee had like three maggies...margaritas...on an empty stomach. Then we headed over to Fusion in Pasadena to dance...he puked all over the floor."

"Mmm...fun times."

"Not really. I didn't drink much."

She eased herself into the room and sat on the sofa next to Exene who'd been sleeping on her leopard pillow in a fuzzy black ball.

"How's your cousin doing?"

Luke thought it an innocent question but Shana didn't respond. She looked down into the brew she was holding with both hands, a thin veil of vapor distorting her face, and it took him a few seconds to see the tears falling freely from her eyes.

"She's dead."

It was spontaneous, reactive, Luke standing, taking two steps over, sitting next to her, putting his arm around her, taking the hot cup from her hands and letting her sob into his UCLA sweatshirt.

Exene reacted to her plangent screech and jumped off the pillow to hide under the desk.

Luke tightened his hold on Shana and immediately felt some action in his sweatpants. Are you kidding me, he thought to himself—I'm popping wood from this poor girl's misery?

"She...she got an infection...pneumonia...but my aunt...she didn't tell us...anyone. Then she called, twenty minutes ago. She said it was for the best, but, you know...."

Shana said this into his body, her face obscured by hair, and Luke looked down at his crotch. Could she see it, the outline of a nascent boner between his legs? He couldn't stand up. He set the hot mug over his dick and winced. Yes! Pain. That might kill it.

"I'm so sorry, Shana. Really."

"She...she's in a better place now. I hate to cry...I dunno why. Girls are supposed to cry, right? But I hate it."

"Hey, I cry," Luke said. " _Out of Africa_...the movie...when Streep goes into the men's club at the end, and they toast her. And the lions on the grave...every damn time."

She giggled, and seemed to relax. "I don't cry at movies. Songs make me cry...that one by Adele, that really sad one..."

"I...I'm not familiar...."

She moved her left hand to his torso, flattened it, as if to clutch him.

"I'm snotting into your sweatshirt," she said with an impromptu giggle.

"That's...that's fine."

She raised her face to look at him, her wet cheeks glistening.

Luke moved the mug to the side table and with his right hand caressed her cheek, using his thumb to wipe the sheen away.

"It's okay," she whispered. "I'm really okay."

He kissed her. She hesitated for a second and he panicked. He pulled away until she put her hand to his head and pulled him back into her lips.

Her tongue begged for attention and Luke reciprocated, the wetness empowering him. She eased back on the couch as he pushed himself into her, no longer embarrassed by his arousal. He worked it, lost himself in her silky, pliant mouth, her hot breath tasting of cinnamon. He moved his hand inside the robe and under her scant T, finding the pillowy smoothness of her left breast and a taught nipple.

She ran her hand over his hard bulge and he wondered if he might just cum from that.

She retreated suddenly, put a hand on his shoulder and stood up.

"Wow, that was weird," she said quietly. "I...I wasn't...I mean I didn't expect to, you know...."

Luke took her hand.

"Hey, I'm sorry...but you're beautiful. I couldn't help it."

Her wide brown eyes melted his anxiety. "No worries."

She smiled, tied her robe together, grabbed her tea mug and left the room.

Luke pressed his hands to his head and bent over, annoyed by the animal throbbing of his cock and succumbing to a spontaneous bout of shame and regret.

She wanted it, he told himself. She had to want it. Of course she wanted it.

He went into the bathroom, locked the door and grabbed himself. In a matter of seconds, as he dwelled on the sensation of their tongues entwined and his hand on her tit, he stroked his wad into the sink and washed it down with warm water.

"Unreal," he mumbled to himself, and went back to his computer.

Two hours later they sat at the butcher-block table in the kitchen, Daryl, Shana and Lucas, eating the omelet and hash browns and bagels he'd made and talking about Luke's budding notoriety.

"Dude, you look effin' scary in that outfit," Daryl was saying, hunched over his plate, eyes bleary from his bacchanal romp the night before. "But it was bold, you know, gettin' the vid out there like that. Where'd you get the cool gun?"

"My friend Danny," Luke said, his eyes darting to Shana who kept titillating him with sidelong glances of her own. They had it now, a secret between them, a major-league secret that promised bigger, more dangerous secrets. "He was in the Gulf War...and he was a hunter, back in the day."

"I think what you're doing is really courageous," Shana inserted, eagerly finishing the last of the food on her plate. She'd wolfed it down, the omelet, clutching her fork like a child. Luke had never noticed this before and he realized he was now seeing her with lascivious eyes. "I mean, from what you said about those cops harassing you. And you're not taking it down, the web site, right?"

Luke stood and went to the carafe to pour more coffee.

"No. No I'm not. I called a lawyer...Melissa...one of Peggi's lawyer, actually, and we talked about it. They can't do shit, the police. I'm totally within my First Amendment rights, according to her. And I did some research, online. The only way they can nail me is if I use that contribution money for something other than what I promised."

"And you're not, right?" Shana had her eyes fixed on his.

"Hell no. It's all legit...all of it."

"Even the million bucks?" Daryl posed. "Where the hell're you getting a million bucks? You don't have that kind'a scratch just lyin' around...do you?"

"I have friends. I know some people," Luke answered coyly. "I'm not worried about it. Assuming someone could rightfully claim it, I won't have to pay for a couple years at least and by then...anything could happen."

Daryl finished eating, got up and loped into the downstairs bathroom.

Shana took that as a cue and brought dishes to the sink where Luke stood.

"Shana, what happened..."

"Shshsh. Not now."

She slid her Droid out of her shorts pocket. "What's your cell number?"

Luke gave it to her and she punched it into the phone. "I'll text you."

"Sure...okay."

She threw a quick glance over her shoulder, heard the toilet flush. "Daryl doesn't know this but my last boyfriend was forty-five."

"Forty-five...as in years?"

"Yeah. TV actor. You'd know him...big name. Came to school last year and spoke at an acting class I was taking. We hooked up for a while...guy still calls me but he got real creepy."

Luke wanted to kiss her again, wanted to grab her and throw her back on the kitchen table and yank those shorts off her smooth brown legs. But he went to the fridge instead to put away the butter and when he turned around Shana was hugging Daryl and guiding him out towards the back porch.

Later that afternoon, as he roamed the aisles of the Ralph's on Sunset for groceries, a text from Shana: "U rocked me this AM. Wasn't sure U were into me!" (a sexy weird emoticon)

Luke wasn't averse to texting, he traded barbs with Danny and his brother John via text, and the fact that he had a big Nokia made it simple. Still, his fingers seemed spastic and skittish as he punched out a response.

"Of course I'm into U. Ever since I saw U, talked to U. U moved me! Ha ha!" No emoticon.

"D's hooking w/frnds later this wk; I'll come over and hang."

"Sounds exclnt. Just don't let him see this!"

"Like, duh! Hitting delete now." (another happy emoticon)

He stared at the rows of Jack Daniels and Wild Turkey and Early Times and Old Crow and Southern Comfort bottles. Nine years earlier his life had become a daily struggle to stay sober enough to function, bringing mini-bottles of Jack into the office and pouring them not-so-discreetly into his coffee, not really caring when his coworkers made odd faces at him as they smelled the sour stench of his addiction.

The bingeing, the barfing, the wailing and calling out for godly intervention on weekends, his retired and guilt-ridden father driving down from McKinleyville virtually non-stop three separate times, 650 miles to intervene, to nurse him through the detoxing, fetching water and yogurt from the store to keep him from convulsing or going into delirium.

He liked to stroll through the liquor section when he shopped, to admire the lethal brown fluid in the orderly bottles and revel in how now, nine years later, he had stifled it, had quashed his craving and become a man again. Yes, a man. A man yearning to bang the girlfriend of his stepson and gain worldly recognition as a crusader for gun control.

He got home, put the food away and went to his desk where he checked his phone for any more texts from Shana. Seeing none, he clicked into the e-mail cache of the Gunsanity site to find this post from "pluto":

" _U never answered my question, mandrake. no problem-O. U think I'm just another psycho killer, quesque se? U may have noticed I've been on the Q-T for a while kickin' it old school with homies from the b'hood but now I'm back on point so beware of breaking news tomorrow involving a traffic jam on the 210. then you can answer me this: how many indonesian kids have U killed with your nike shoes? pluto OUT!!!!!"_

"pluto OUT!!!!!"

What a douche. No, a nutbag. Like so many of the others.

Who was this guy? What the hell was he trying to say? Or do?

Yet Luke couldn't deny it, his euphoria dissipating, replaced in that narrow synaptic fringe between the rational and the fantastic with the nucleus of a sensation he could only define as fear.

## ***

# Chapter 27

Kristina padded up to his desk Monday morning in a tight-fitting purple jumper Luke found unappealing. She held a venti cup of Starbucks and leaned against his desk as he plugged some numbers into an Excel report for the upcoming marketing meeting pertaining to the all-important Assertive Management Program.

"Luker...nice sniper vid on YouTube," she said in a mock-flirtatious voice. "You should wear camo to the office, like, always."

"I was making a statement," he said with a smirk.

"Kind'a ballsy, in my humble opinion...especially that reward thang. Just tell me you're not some billionaire with a secret cash-stash and only working here because you love the office banter with the likes of me."

Luke backed away from his computer and faced her. Yeah, the banter was typical but the body language had changed. The hem of her outfit was hiked on her thigh and she didn't seem to care. And her eyes fluttered when she spoke, almost as if she were nervous, or anxious.

"Negative, K-girl. I'm just the point guy for a coalition of people who want to be proactive. Too many people play lip service to the gun violence in this country."

Jason stuck his meaty head over the partition.

"Hey Luke, saw your web site. Totally rocks, dude...really impressive." He held up a thick thumb and beamed.

"Thanks, J-Mon... 'preciate the feedback."

Later, as the meeting started, Brenda mentioned that she wanted to speak to him afterwards. Sure, Luke said blandly.

The presentation went well, Luke was on his game, everyone liked his ideas for the viral campaign to promote the AMP, and afterwards Brenda ushered him into her office, shutting the door behind him. She had on another one of her retro hippy outfits, a tie-dyed blouse bulging over those balloons on her chest, and a paisley muslin broomstick skirt swishing around as she walked. She went behind the desk but didn't sit, instead standing with feet apart and sort of swaying like she was prepping for a yoga routine.

BRENDA: "Very nice presentation, Luke. Gil was obviously impressed."

LUKE: "He didn't say much."

BRENDA: "No, but he grunted a lot. That's always good."

They laughed a little.

BRENDA: "Jason alerted me to your...uh, your new web site...and I saw something on the news about it as well."

LUKE: "That's why we're meeting now?"

BRENDA: "I wouldn't call this a meeting. We're just chatting...right?"

LUKE: "Sure, okay."

BRENDA: "I just...first let me say that I really admire what you're trying to do, your obvious efforts to stop what is without question a terrifying situation for so many people."

LUKE: "I felt like I had to do something...especially in the wake of Peggi's death."

BRENDA: "Of course, of course. And we all support that. I just...it's important that you understand how, as an educational institution, we need to ensure that the public perception..."

LUKE: "Whoa! Hey, is this some kind of a..."

BRENDA: "Please, Luke, just let me finish. I'm just saying that we need to make sure you keep your personal crusade exactly that—personal, and that you don't, uh, associate WBC with your current, uh...activities."

LUKE: "But I haven't, at all. I haven't mentioned this place at all. In the half-dozen interviews I've done so far I've only identified myself as a blogger or a web designer."

BRENDA: "Yes, yes we know that. And that's exactly what we'd like you to do...to keep doing..."

Luke sat there for another five minutes listening to what amounted to a not-so-veiled warning that if he brought the institution's good name under scrutiny they just might can his ass.

Brenda concluded her little spiel with a brief update on her daughter, Cara, how she'd just been accepted into some prestigious arts college in the Bay area, and Luke nodded and smiled indulgently as he reciprocated with news about Britney, how she'd just started school again, was off her antidepressants and was holding her own in the adolescent grieving process.

He went back to his desk and noticed a short stack of mail in his IN box that he was about to open when Kristina startled him from behind.

"Lukie, you gotta check out KNBC.com right now...another sniper attack!"

He sat there motionless for a second as he absorbed her pale face, then edged towards his computer and wrapped his hand around the trackball.

In seconds he found the streaming live vid from a helicopter circling an epic scene of déjà-vu proportions, a jack-knifed tractor-trailer rig on its side, the cab smashed against a bridge abutment and a couple cars crumpled in the crook of the debris. Emergency vehicles surrounded the crash and a ring of what looked like snow covered the vehicles.

Over the vid, the banner head: "Live from the 210 Freeway near Glendora."

Luke turned up the volume on his speakers: "...apparently two fatalities have been confirmed, the driver of the big rig and a female passenger, with at least five others injured, some seriously. Firefighters quickly covered the site in foam after the truck leaked fuel from a ruptured tank and you can see a chopper on that off-ramp preparing to medivac someone to nearby Loma Linda hospital..."

Luke bolted from his chair and ran out of the office. He wasn't sure he could make it to the men's room far down the hallway and he braced himself against the wall. Sweat seeped from his scalp and he gagged. He pushed through the bathroom door and staggered to the sink where he coughed, turned on the faucet and splashed water on his face.

"Jeezuz," he muttered. "Jeezuz fucking Christ."

"Who is that?"

A voice from the stall ten feet away, possibly Gil's.

He didn't answer, grabbed a paper towel, turned the water off and went back out into the hallway.

He stumbled down the stairs and found a spot on the wall outside the building, faced the lawn and wished he could just light up a cig and distract himself with a few comforting drags of nicotine-laced smoke. But he didn't smoke and he couldn't shake the harsh suspicion that what had just happened on that freeway was somehow linked to and motivated by his own quest for vigilante recognition.

But why? If that "pluto" guy and the Southland Sniper were in fact the same twisted mass-killer, why bring _him_ into the mix? Why not send those cryptic e-mails to that Maria Delgado anchor babe on the KXLA news? Or some big-time editor on the _L.A. Times_? Or...or, shit, post them on Facebook? The Gunsanity site had been up barely two weeks and this lethal freak was now targeting him, Lucas H. Mandrake—not with a rifle (yet), but with a laptop.

Luke's brain churned and tumbled, his emotions putting everything on a dizzying spin cycle.

The cops. I should call them. That Winkle guy, the FBI agent. Tell him what's going down. That there's been contact, contact with the sniper, the Southland Sniper, the guy who's picking off L.A. truckers and bus drivers with cool, expert efficiency. No. Wait. Hang on. Calm down. Get a grip, Lucas, get a fucking grip! It could still be some kind of coincidence. Possible. Not likely. Something else—something more sinister.

Curiosity.

Clearly, the sniper had singled Luke out from the rest of the world, as far as he knew. The video. Of course. Thousands of hits on YouTube and links on three major news websites, including CNN and MSNBC. A siphon to the source of his grassroots effort to effect change and somehow make a difference. A beacon of heroic brightness to attract the most lethal of insects.

He went back to the office and sat at his desk, fumbled through the mail, struggled to focus on a couple site update requests from Gil, and sent an e-mail to Brenda at just after 2 p.m.: "Hey Brenda—Got a migraine, feeling lousy, so I'm heading home. I'll come in early tomorrow and finish those updates Gil requested."

Kristina caught him as he stood with valise in hand.

"You taking off, Luker?"

"Yeah. Killer migraine...among other things."

"Mmm...sorry to hear it. Hey, I donated money to your cause."

"Huh?"

"The web site. Twenty bucks!"

"You rock."

Luke gave her a mock hug and left.

He was back at the house in 24 minutes and after he'd let the cats out found another text from Shana on his Nokia: "When I think of us yesterday I get gooey. U2?"

Yeah, he was gooey all right. But a different kind of gooey. A shitty gooey, like the guy who farts and realizes he passed more than gas.

He texted her back: "Call me when U can, we need to talk."

Her response, a frowning emoticon and "OK".

## ***

# Chapter 28

A patchwork blanket of June fog hung over the town as Luke walked to the Subway shop on Swarthmore just off Sunset and ordered a spicy Italian foot-long to go.

The panic from a few hours before had subsided but his mind still raced, mostly with flagellating thoughts about how the Gunsanity site might have been a colossal exercise in bad judgment after all. Yes, it had become something of a magnet for the kooks, crackpots, and social malcontents who used the internet as a community corkboard for their bilious slogans, but that was simply a byproduct of his good intentions, wasn't it? To get to the meat you had to cut out the offal, right? Well, the fact that "pluto" wanted to establish some kind of dialogue with him certainly qualified as "meat." Red, bloody, with some sweetbreads thrown in the mix.

As a toothy black girl asked him what he wanted on his sandwich, Luke had another impulse to call the task force hotline.

_Sure. Call them_. _Tell them the Southland Sniper likes to go by the nom-de-plum "pluto," that he's a big fan of my work, and that his writing skill rates right up there with the likes of Dylan Klebold and Charlie Manson. And revealing that would make me, what—either a kook, a crackpot, or another social malcontent. All I had were a few cryptic e-mails and a called shot on a tractor-trailer rig tooling down the 210 Freeway. They might believe me. Like hell._

_Relax,_ he had to tell himself. _Keep your cool, and calm down. Eat your dinner. Go online and do a little research about criminal minds and deviant behavior. Wait for further contact. Masturbate, to relieve some tension. Talk to Shana and tell her you think it's a bad idea to consummate their mutual infatuations._

He got some jalapeno chips with the sandwich and the bag felt heavy in his hands as he trod back to the house.

His "Whole Lotta Love" ringtone sounded and he assumed it was her. He wasn't in the mood to talk about their feelings now but he didn't want to leave her hanging, either.

He glanced at the screen, saw "Unknown Number," held the phone to his face.

"Luke here."

Nothing.

"Hello...this is Luke..."

"Hey, Mister Gunsanity on the horn."

A block from his house, walking in front of a remodeled craftsman, Luke felt his sphincter contract. He stopped cold on the sidewalk.

"I...who...who is this?"

"I had a bitch of a time getting your number."

The cramping spread to his lower intestines, went to his stomach.

"Can you...please...who..."

"That vid you posted...I fuckin' roll over every time I watch it. Love the piece, though...those old Brownings."

The voice had a drawl to it, Midwestern, but lacked energy, as if the guy had just got up or was about to go to sleep. Luke leaned against a tree, winced at his visceral discomfort.

"Can you please tell me who..."

"pluto...that's all you need to know."

" 'pluto'..."

"So guess where I am."

Luke forced himself to move with the phone pressed against his ear. "I...I don't have the slightest..."

"Outside some lame fuckin' Starbucks in...wouldn't you love to know." He laughed. "But hey, free wi-fi and people...people can be so fuckin' stupid, man. Just leavin' their cells an' laptops lyin' around while they go for refills or pissin' their mocha latte's...idiots."

"That was you, this morning. What happened, on the 210?"

"No, dude, no. That was a bullet. Just one. Pretty fuckin' amazin', eh?"

Luke reached the house and went up the driveway. He unlatched the gate and continued into the back yard where he could still get a signal.

"Yeah...yes. Amazing."

"Dude, I've been writing you for weeks. Why haven't you hit me back?"

"I...I'm sorry...pluto. But I've been getting hundreds, hundreds of e-mails..."

"Sure, just lump me in there with the rest of the retards. Okay, well, fuck 'em. It's me you need to worry about now."

Luke sat in the porch swing and set his sandwich bag on the side table. The tension in his body had come full circle and reconstituted in his bowels, and began to build.

"Right, okay. So then, can I ask you...I mean, what...what's motivating you..."

"No, we don't go there. Here's where we go. I've got stuff, stuff I've written."

"Stuff you've written..."

"Yeah. I thought about laying it out on some social site but Facebook's for fags, you know...everybody lookin' for affirmation and fuckin' 'likes.' Then I thought about the _Times_ but I'm thinkin' that might be over the top and a red flag for the Keystone Cops and their so-called task force. Thing is, I need a good, like, editor. Someone to work it, tighten shit up. I have a tendency to, uh, you know...ramble. And I can't spell for shit."

"What, so you want me...you want me to edit your...your..."

"Call it a manifesto. Or a, you know, a mission statement. I like how you think, Mandrake, and I want to sound intelligent. People take you serious when you sound intelligent."

"You like how I think. But you don't even know me..."

"Dude, I've been a fan for a while. 'Mandrake's Take'...'Sergeant Gutter'...I like that shit you been posting about the show in Laughganistan."

Luke flushed, both from the pain emanating through his colon and the tinge of pride he felt at what amounted to a compliment.

"Okay, so you want me to..."

"I'm gonna send you some shit tonight and you look it over, tell me if it's worthy of your hallowed soap box."

"Why are you shooting innocent people?" The question came out almost like a belch and Luke wanted to apologize for asking it.

A pause, maybe five seconds.

"'Innocent?' You think six billion selfish, over-consuming, paranoid assholes are fuckin' _innocent_?"

"Then...then that's your justification..."

"Hey, I don't have to justify fuckin' shit, man! It's all energy, dude! Read your physics, man. Mass is energy...Einstein, Hawking...axions, gluons, anyons...and I'm just a conduit. Don't ask me where it comes from! I'm not some fuckin' Gabriel. I just feel it! It's in me, okay...so I can't 'justify' it, Mandrake!"

Luke said nothing, fought the pain in his lower body, and waited.

"Just read it and make it better. I'll get back to you in a couple cycles."

He hung up.

Luke stared at the Nokia screen, saw "Disconnected," rolled off the swing and barely made it to the downstairs bathroom bowl before yanking his pants down and releasing a putrid stream of liquefied terror.

## ***

# Chapter 29

As Luke sat at his desk in the dark study and worked to process the phone call he'd just concluded with 'pluto,' Shana called. He went back out to the porch to take it.

She was with a girlfriend in the Marina but she wanted to get it over with, if Luke was having second thoughts about what might happen between them.

"I got this vibe from your text, Luke, like maybe you weren't into it, into me..."

"No, no...Shana. I...it's not you. No...sorry. It IS you...so much of it is you. I'm just, you know...with everything that's been happening..."

"Okay, so...what...is it too weird for you?"

"Weird? No. Yeah. Maybe. But that's a good thing. I like weird. Not kinky weird, but exotic weird."

"Exotic weird. Yeah, I've heard that before. I'm exotic...taboo. Dark meat for the white master..."

"Hey, don't go there. It's not like that at all. I'm attracted to you as a person. A total person. But it doesn't hurt that you happen to be the hottest woman I've ever met."

Seconds passed and Luke closed his eyes. He wanted to be noble, to end it here and now, but that idea totally crushed him.

"You...you really think that, Luke?"

"Yes. Yes I do."

"I knew we'd hook up...the first time I saw you."

Relief washed over him. YES!

"You did?"

"Then, that day on the swing. Dude, your attraction was like so obvious."

"You noticed that...damn."

"Hell yes I noticed. The thing practically tore a hole in your pants and introduced itself. Nothing to be embarrassed about...it turned me on."

"But Shana...you're involved. With my stepson."

"Not really. Me and Dee...we're on the outs. He's high like 24/7, so..."

"But things could get really awkward..."

"Are you scared? Because if it scares you..."

"No! No, don't ever assume that about me. I may have fear about things, I may have reservations, but that'll never keep me from getting what I want! And I want you."

"Mmm...that's better. So does Thursday work?"

"Yeah...Thursday. Thursday's good."

"You good with me texting you, if I want?"

"Yes. Text me. I like it."

"Excellent."

She disconnected and he went back into the house. Okay, wasn't he supposed to be the mature adult here? Wasn't he going to tell her how it was all just a distraction from current and mutual emotional upheavals? That it could only end badly, even if they did enjoy a few intense trysts together?

Damn, he wanted her. He wanted her like nothing else. But the timing totally sucked. Hey, timing was something he could not control. Another one of those AA-related homilies. We have to take life on life's terms, right? And that included bad timing. _So just fucking deal with it._

Could it be that at this moment, after having established a bona fide connection with a mass killer and gradually accepting his unique place in the great scheme of things, that Luke's desire for her had been amplified? That framing himself as the next great American blogger with a notorious sniper for a source inflated his ego and acted on his libido like a ground-up rhino horn?

Luke went to the frig, grabbed a near-beer and opened a can of tuna for the cats. He watched them lick and chomp their dinner and he felt better.

Yes, fantasize about Shana. Read what "pluto" has to say. Get a better idea of who he is, what he's about, what he hopes to accomplish by shooting and killing random drivers on L.A.'s busy freeways.

You can handle it, he told himself. You can do this—communicating with one of the most feared persons in America while banging your stepson's girlfriend!

_And if I can't?_ he quietly posed to himself.

Well, then, maybe it's time for a relapse.

## ***

# Chapter 30

" _Investigators continue to follow numerous potential leads in the Southland Sniper attacks but admit they are really no closer now than they were three months ago to making any arrests, or even identifying any persons of interest...."_

—Maria Delgado, KXLA News

Early Wednesday morning, Luke found this short e-mail in his queue: "yo mandrake—check the attachment and work your word magic on my rant! my writing is like streem of conscienceness, like Keroak. didn't mean to bark at U on the horn, but I get impatiant!! i'll ring you in a couple. pluto out!"

Luke opened the Word document, a single paragraph three pages long, no formatting at all, minimal caps or punctuation, erratic grammar, and phonetic misspellings of misused words. But it had energy, a vitality roiling under all the obvious errors, and Luke began to work it.

Two hours later, after calling the office and telling Jason to tell Brenda he was having stomach problems but would be in by eleven, Luke posted pluto's submission on the Gunsanity web site as a "Guest commentary from a notable gun rights practitioner who wishes to remain anonymous at this time."

He did his best to keep the raw, adolescent intensity of the syntax while enhancing the readability of what amounted to a polemic against human breeding:

In the movie Blade Runner, a science fiction epic made in 1978 starring the overrated actor Harrison Ford and the great German actor Rutger Hauer, the planet Earth has become severely overpopulated and polluted as humans seek to escape the planet by going 'off-world' to other planets where they can breed and potentially destroy those planets as well. Hauer plays Roy Batty, a human-like super-being called a Nexus 6 replicant and Harrison Ford plays Deckard, a 'blade runner' who must exterminate Batty since he is perceived as a threat because he's somewhat angry over the fact that his lifespan is only five years long. At the end of the movie when the replicant Batty has a chance to kill the pathetic and ineptly human Deckard, he says something which I totally identify with, being a recent veteran and participant in the nightmare of our overseas clusterfuck ops. What Roy Batty says is, 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion...moments lost in time...like tears in the rain. Time to die.'

In this day and age, mankind has reached a critical point in his history, both past and future. The planet Earth faces overpopulation, overexploitation, and the total depletion of resources which will certainly result in major chaos and social upheaval.

In 1968 Dr. John B. Calhoun, a scientist working for the government, conducted an experiment involving mice who were bred to overpopulate their giant cage, resulting in the total breakdown of social behaviors including the physical and emotional abuse of their young, the male mice failing to defend their territory and unable to fight off non-provoked attacks, more aggressive women mice, and the inability of the women mice to get pregnant, breed, and continue the species. In other words, after reaching a point of overpopulation the mouse society reversed its course and headed towards total extinction. Only when most of the mice had died from these overcrowded conditions could the mouse society begin to rebuild itself into a functioning social order again....

The wild diatribe went on, included the prophesies of Zoroaster, highlights from the Book of Revelations (2:11, specifically), and Friedrich Nietzsche's concepts of both nihilism and eternal return, and Luke had to admit that whatever else motivated pluto to mete out death on a whim, the dude was obviously well-read and capable of presenting a point of view.

His "manifesto" ended with this cryptic paragraph:

As we read these prophesies of doom and Apocalypse, we must understand that everything is finite, that all things that live must die, and that in order for the living to find value, joy, peace, and fulfillment in life, we must make sure that our earthly habitat does not suffer from the same horrible fate as Dr. Calhoun's mice. Therefore, I believe we must do everything in our power to promote the reduction in global population, to thin the herd of voracious consumers, including drastic methods that many people may not agree with, so that we don't end up like the replicant Roy Batty with only a few years to live on the planet.

Luke posted the piece at 10:04 a.m., took a shower and drove to the office. During his lunch break he went online to review the Gunsanity comments cache:

" _What in God's name is that drivel you just posted and who is this 'pluto' dude? I thought your website was about ending gun violence, not preaching the end of the world and condoning what sounds like abortion and genocide to 'thin the herd', so-to-speak...."_

" _Hey, I like this pluto guy. Less people on the planet is the only way to stop all the shit from happening like so-called global warming and the fucking chinese taking over everything...."_

" _Please, Mister Mandrake, no more weird soapbox BS on your web site. It's people like this who give the gun control movement a bad name, although I don't think he's advocating gun control so much as people control...."_

" _Wow, I gotta go back and watch Blade Runner again. That experiment with the mice sounds scary. Anybody who calls themselves pluto has to have some crackpot ideas, but he made me think about things in a new way!!!"_

" _This pluto guy sounds like a closet skinhead wannabe or a Hitler-O-phile which isn't all bad but definitely tends to alienate the mainstream...."_

By the end of the day, Luke would read another 77 messages, almost equally split between hating and loving pluto's justification for murder.

## ***

# Chapter 31

When his cell rang at 5:22 a.m. that Thursday morning Luke was already on his second cup of coffee, sitting at his computer and waiting.

"Hello...hello?"

"Nice work, Mandrake. You turned my Chicken Licken shitstorm into something like Hemingway on meth."

"You...you liked it?"

"Fuckin' aye... 'though I'm a little tweaked you cut the part on the Holocaust."

Luke could hear music in the background, loud, and pluto's voice seemed thicker.

"Yeah, well, I can't give people the impression I even vaguely endorse the slaughter of six million people," Luke asserted, "as much as you think it's only one of many options to 'thin the herd,' as you put it."

"Yeah, I can see your point of view, but I'm gonna rework it in a way to make it more, you know, palatable, and resubmit it for my next post."

"Your next post?"

"Yeah...I'm thinkin' we could make this a regular thing, like maybe once a week or somethin'."

"Have you read the reactions to your, ah...manifesto?"

"Total fuck-tards, most of 'em, 'though a few were on the money."

"And you think you can stay, uh, viable...indefinitely?"

"You mean if I can keep my ass from gettin' smoked?"

"Yeah...something like that."

"Dude, they don't have a fuckin' clue about me, aw-right? They so don't have a clue they're like sayin' they don't have a clue."

"But they might get a clue if you start exposing yourself."

"Negative. Lemme tell you, Mandrake, I'm invisible to those clowns running their so-called task force. Because I'm aces...a pro, courtesy of dear Uncle Sam who taught me the art of stealthy execution. And I know where you live, dude...so there's that."

Luke closed his eyes, worked to control the adverse metabolic reaction to pluto's implied threat.

"You...you know where I live..."

"Hey, it's all about the intel, you know. Learned that in the 'Stan. Good intel saves lives...and can seriously enhance the bad-guy body count."

"Okay, so, am I the bad guy here?"

"Dude, you need to chill-ax. My next piece...you want words on guns, I'll give you words on guns, Mandrake. And ammo, which is really what it's all about, the pro-jec-tile, the love letter, like some 2250 FPS H-V rounds that can hold the shape of a human skull at a thousand yards. Then poof...that skull is gone, muthafucka!"

Luke couldn't speak. Something filled his glottis again, a spontaneous swelling like the air sack of a toad.

"You still there, Fan-drake? That's your new handle, 'cause I know you're a fan of my work. Okay, time to ditch this POS phone. God I love Starbucks. Look for my next opus, word-smith...and watch your back."

"pluto? pluto...hey!"

But he was gone, his Farmer John voice replaced by digital static and the immensity of the not-so-surprising epiphany that Luke was now a walking, talking bullseye.

## ***

# Chapter 32

He should've cancelled. He should've called or texted her and played the high-road morality card after all.

She lay beside him on the bed in one of Daryl's "Kings of Leon" tees, her head propped on an elbow as Luke stared at the ceiling with a green robe covering his otherwise naked body and his uncooperative junk.

"He kept wanting me to strangle him with this clothe belt," she was saying, "and after a few times it just...he nearly died once, I think. But he begged for it...I mean, like, all the time."

"Onanism...erotic asphyxiation."

"Yeah, right. I read something about it...."

She was by far the finest, most alluring female Luke had ever had the privilege of finger-banging. But now, with her shaved, petite mons yearning for his tumescence, he was distracted. That's what he told her. Alotta shit on his mind. Though he didn't get specific, like for example the barely coherent banter of a serial sniper that swirled around in his brain like a flushing toilet.

"So you really do have a thing for older guys."

"Oh yeah. I had to cut it off, though," she said with a quick giggle. "The relationship, I mean. It just got so creepy. And the dude was married, with a couple kids. He took it bad and I almost had to get like a restraining order."

Luke finally turned his body and soaked her in, this seraphic girl so willing to fuck him and so sweet in his dismal performance.

"I'm starting to think that maybe the web site, and the reward...maybe they weren't such a good idea. It's been on my mind. I think that's why...well, it's possible that..."

"I love your web site. I think it's really courageous of you," she said, rolling onto her back. "Especially considering some of those hate e-mails you've been getting from all those gun nuts. There was that one I read yesterday, the guy who said he'd like to have a face-to-face with you, or better yet, a fist-to-fist. And that other guy who called you 'a Marxist faggot and gun-control nigger.' I mean, how harsh is that?"

Luke smiled as he turned and put a hand on her thigh. "What about that guest commentary? Did you read..."

She let out a minor gasp. "Oh yeah, that rant you posted. Wow, yeah, that was really kind'a weird. I mean, it wasn't so much about guns and gun-control, as...as..."

"People control."

"You said he was like a guest writer or something..."

"He, uh...a friend of mine. A fan...of my earlier posts. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea."

"No, I think it's good to get all perspectives. You know, from all sides...."

Luke moved his hand down to her tummy and pulled the t-shirt up. His finger tips roved over the silken skin there, absorbed the heat from that no-man's land above her narrow landing strip.

"Can I ask you something?" she murmured. "You think I have a cute pussy? Sometimes I think it's like too...you know...flabby."

Luke pushed himself up on an elbow and peered down. That's when it happened, the surge in brain fluids, the tingling in his spine, the blood rush to his cock.

He wet his middle finger, found her pink nub and massaged it gently.

"No...no...not at all. It's so...so subtle...and elegant."

"Elegant? Really...an elegant pussy," she whispered. "Yeah, just keep doing that. Mmm...nice."

She eased back on the pillow and cooed as he created a rhythm.

Oh yeah, Luke thought to himself. Sometimes that's all it takes, a minor trigger, usually visual, but the sound effects helped, too, and in seconds he'd propped a pillow under her butt as she deftly unwrapped another condom and rolled it onto his hardened shaft.

They fucked, slow and deliberate at first, Luke immersing himself in the moment, succumbing to the urges, the primitive discordance of sensational lust, then letting himself go, indulging his need to pound her, to thrust himself deep into her syrupy warm canal. She yelped, arched her neck, ran her hands over her boobs as Luke pushed the t-shirt up and leaned down to kiss her pert nipples.

"Oh, yeah, wow!" she crooned. "Oh yeah...harder...harder...."

Her exhortations kept him engorged and he began to moan, and pant, and sweat. Time contracted: ten, fifteen, twenty minutes of unfettered fucking, turning her over, pushing her legs every which way, kneading her firm breasts with reactive hands, compelling her to turn the word "Yes!" into a mantra of quivering rapture.

He saw it on her fine ass, the hummingbird tattoo with the words "She Rules Her Life Like a Bird in Flight" scrolled in French cursive below, and it took him to another level of predatory frenzy as she murmured "yes, fuck yes, fuck yes!" over and over.

When he felt himself about to let go he withdrew and put his mouth on her clit, darting his tongue over undulating tissue, tasting her essence, grabbing her ass with his right hand as she squirmed and pulled a pillow over her mouth a second before unleashing a primal howl.

Luke yanked the rubber off as he came, squirting his white cream onto her caramel midriff and filling the air with a Gregorian chant of manly reaffirmation.

"Yes! Yes, I'm back...I'M BACK!"

## ***

# Chapter 33

"Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?"

Danny, complaining about Luke's unforced errors and five double-faults in one set.

"I, uh...I've got alotta shit on my mind."

"Yeah, well, obviously it isn't tennis."

Sweat rolled off Luke's head and soaked into his already wet white polo shirt as he tromped off the court to wipe himself down.

Danny stood at the bench running a towel over his face and wincing into the morning light.

"You know I love to kick your ass, but at least make me earn it."

Luke stood up straight, glanced over at a young girl on the next court who reminded him of Shana. "You earned it, bro! This humidity's killing me, and I...I guess I'm distracted."

"Okay. Shit, why am I complaining? I played fucking awesome!"

"Yes you did."

"C'mon...I'll cook you an omelet and continue the ass-kicking in nine-ball."

"Sounds good."

Luke followed Danny's white Dodge SUV to his house in Alamitos not far from the marina and sat at the breakfast bar as his host whipped up egg-white Denver omelets and fixed hash browns laced with caramelized onions. The stucco Spanish split-level house was modest but clean, well-furnished, and Danny took pride in his $4000 Brunswick pool table that he'd found on ebay and had delivered from an estate sale in San Diego. It occupied the family area adjacent to the kitchen and he and Luke had played many a game of low-stakes nine-ball while watching football on the 70" plasma flat screen.

"I'm starting to think maybe I overdid it with that website," Luke was saying as Danny sliced up some green peppers on the butcher-block countertop.

"And that whacky video?"

"Yeah...especially the whacky video."

Flipping a dish towel over his shoulder, Danny dribbled some peanut oil into the wide Califon pan and cranked up the gas flame underneath. "Hey, I know it must've been tough losing Peggi like you did but I gotta tell ya...that dude out there, he's no amateur. The fact the cops don't even have a suspect yet...that tells you how smart he is. And that lobbying bullshit...I don't think you really appreciate how much Americans love their fucking assault guns. I mean really obsess over them. Shit, man, in the corps, I knew so many dudes who said the only reason they joined was so they could blow shit up with machine guns and get paid for it."

Luke wanted to tell him everything, to spill it all right there in the kitchen, but couldn't. Keeping pluto private was the only way he could protect himself, for now.

"Dan-O, I know you don't like to talk about it, your time in the Gulf, but I need to know what...what it's like to shoot guns at people...humans. What...what goes through your mind...your feelings, you know?"

Danny threw the shallots, pepper slices and ham into the pan and let them sizzle. He stood stoically at the range, obviously put off by the question.

"Unless you've been there, in the shit...I can't," he said in a virtual monotone. "I can't do it justice. It's a beast, inside you. It wants to come out, and sometimes, when you show it the light.... This one time...shit, I've never told this before...this one time we were clearing a village, just a bunch'a mud huts and a few date palms, and one of our guys, black dude, we called him Shaft 'cause he was always saying 'Shut yo' mouth!', he caught one in the chest, a sniper, fuckin' Kevlar vest saved his ass, and nobody could be sure where it came from so we took cover and just opened up on a couple sand igloos. I mean, with everything. And we could hear screaming, women...and a couple guys ran out waving white towels and we just...they went to pieces, literally, and our C-O kept yellin' 'cease fire, cease fire!' but we couldn't just hold up, everyone wanted to squeeze off a few more rounds. 'Cause it's like having sex, you know, and you don't want to stop, you wanna keep going, even when the woman's begging you to stop. No, you know what?"

Danny aimed his face at Luke's and seemed to inflate it.

"It's better than sex. Shooting that gun...killing other human beings you believe to be evil...it was the most intense rush I've ever had. And this is from a guy who fucked three Thai babes at once and did black tar heroin for a year."

Despite the confession Luke soon had regrets about pulling such dark recollections from his friend's past because the two barely said another word to each other as they ate their tainted breakfast, and an hour later he left Danny dozing in front of the TV without even saying goodbye.

## ***

# Chapter 34

Late that afternoon he got the next posting from pluto (posted here with errors intact) and Luke considered it more than a little coincidental after his earlier conversation with Danny. He read it over a couple times and had what amounted to an emotional seizure:

last night I was watching some show on tv about puppy farms in korea where they breed puppies to eat them, and so their showing these puppies in like a butcher room where the puppies sit in a cage all shivvering with fear and some guy with a giant meat cleavor takes them one at a time and wacks off their heads and butchers them while the other puppies watch. so then instead of puppies imagine being children watching their brothers and sisters getting the hell beat out of them by their own father almost every night and getting your own ass kicked as well. i will take this story one step further now and say that if you grow up in such an envirnmnent with seven other brothers and sisters who all hate this father with a real pashion, then you can imagine what might happen to him if he loves to go deer hunting and takes his two 'favourite' sons with him one day and there's an accident and he's no longer able to breed sad offspring and hurt them. but enough said about that.

one other thing we need to talk about and that's what happened at a famous bridge over a famous river in a popular shit-hole destination for many american warfighters back in the day, something i witnessed with my own eyes because i was an active participant. without naming names, although i will say this happened in 2003 to give it some context, a bunch of us (us being elite members of our precious "national treasure" as politicians like to refer to us) had the job of protecting this bridge while our enginneers made needed repairs so we could get our heavy tanks across it and enter the famous asshole of the world to liberate it from terrorists and evildoers, and so we took up a position that comanded a view of this long road that came down to the bridge from the other side. that's when ordinary civilians trying to escape our liberating army and the resistance fighters defending there homeland started trying to approach and cross this bridge, except that we all thought they were the insurgents trying to attack us so we attacked them back, a battalion of tired, angry grunts just literely spraying thousands of rounds of hot ammo on a bunch of men and women in their dusty vans and trucks full of kids, lots of kids, all trying to escape the invasion, only they did not escape, i can tell you that right now. and it was total and absolute chaos for them, driving down that hill and getting greeted with a wall of hvs fired from small and large caliber weapons which literally disintegrated them in the cars. and no matter what you might have heard about that particular event the numbers were much, much higher than anyone wants to admit to.

i guess my point in saying all this is that this kind of slaughter is what will happen when the global population reaches critical mass and we all start shooting and hacking at each other like those tribes in africa did back in the 1990s. this also probably explains why more and more people are now relying on guns to live their ordinary lives so they can protect themselves from the inevatable global catastrophy that awaits them.

my final point being that everyone needs to use condoms and practice safe sex and birth control because otherwise we're all going to watch each other die like those puppies in korea and those poor civiliens in bugdad!

"He's fucking insane."

Luke said this aloud to himself and laughed. He laughed because he was finally able to see with vivid clarity how he had committed a misguided folly of self-promotion and delusion. Having used the sniper's twisted actions to bolster his own image in the public eye, Luke felt something akin to shame. Like the popular class clown he'd always imagined himself to be in high school, until the girl he had a crush on in third-period Geometry said he was a fool, and "hard up for attention."

"Hard up for attention." The struggle for attention, making oneself seen and heard in the world. Yes, okay, now he had it, all the attention he could handle, from a bona-fide homicidal groupie.

But that was it, wasn't it? The American way? Promoting yourself and your agenda at the expense of others? Only in this case, it was rather extreme. To say the least. The misfortunes of 49 dead people from Joaquin Ruiz' rampage at CVCC, and another 21 mangled drivers and passengers at the hands of this asshole calling himself 'pluto.' Not to mention a couple hundred wounded, scarred, emotionally shattered victims of these two maniacs whom Luke had assumed would lionize him as a champion of their suffering. Yeah, right.

He went into the kitchen and found some old pizza and a soggy Caesar salad that would suffice for dinner. He put the sausage pie in the microwave and stared at the red, white and brown mottled mass rotating on the glass platen.

NO! What made him relevant now was what he knew about this guy.

Incriminating things.

His Nokia pinged, distracting him, at the same time the microwave dinged. His pizza was done, and Shana had just sent him a text:

"U all right? Left you a msg and a txt. Listen to it & GBTM."

He didn't know what "GBTM" meant—maybe "Get Beyond The Moment," or something similarly esoteric.

Luke called his voicemail and listened to her message: "Hey, uh, where are you? I've been...I'm thinking about you, like, all the time. What happened the other day, it was like...a dream...." Blah blah blah. Great, he thought. Congratulations, idiot. Now she'd crush Daryl's heart for sure and they'd eventually have to come out and tell the world they were, what, "hookin' up"? "Dating?" "A couple"?

Despite being stale and flaccid, the pizza tasted good. Same with the salad. He was hungry, and Luke was able to forgive himself for the situation with Shana. He was just a man, a normal guy with perhaps a slightly larger than normal hypothalamus that made sex with exceptionally hot 20-year-olds more intense and ultimately life-affirming than for your average, overweight American slob. He liked her, and he liked fucking her, so enough with the false contrition, aw-right?

He texted her back: "Hey S.—Sorry for silence. Been writing. Can I call U 2nite?"

She responded in just under five minutes. "Can you call now?"

He called her. They talked for a while and he felt better about things. She said she'd be over Thursday with Daryl. Okay, he said. Will we be able to hang? Yeah, she said, he'll be in and out. There was a joke there, but Luke avoided it. Great, he said, I'm looking forward to it. Me too, she said.

An hour later Luke sat in front of his HP monitor and tried to compose something meaningful around pluto's new post which he'd just finished editing and was ready to publish. There was only one problem: the only "meaningful" thing he could think of was how incredibly fucked in the head pluto seemed to him now. He loved that expression, "fucked in the head," and had used it often in his college days at Cal State Northridge. He'd even used it to describe President Ronald Reagan in an editorial decrying the political legerdemain of that whole Iran-Contra mess, and how Reagan and his cadre of basement plotters were all "essentially fucked in the head for assuming the American people would be gullible enough to sanction and condone such a devious means for arming the Central American death squads." That editorial had incited a minor riot among conservative students on campus and led to his dismissal from the school paper, after which he'd told the Dean of Media Relations that he, too, was "fucked in the head." A month later, Luke was no longer attending Cal State Northridge.

"No can do," Luke mumbled to himself as he highlighted the edited draft of pluto's rant and hit "Delete" on the keyboard. _Viola!_

Yes, fucked in the head.

Only now, Luke had to worry about getting shot in the head.

## ***

# Chapter 35

Brenda had been harping on him all morning to finish a landing page for the school's upcoming Open House and he was working on his third cup of tepid coffee to help him stay focused when he heard a gasp from across the aisle.

Kristina popped her head above her cubie's partition and blurted a bulletin in Luke's direction.

"He did it again, the sniper...shot a tour bus on I-15 north of Devore."

Luke turned his chair to face her.

"When?" The volume in his voice startled her.

"Uh, I just...I was scanning the _LA Times_ site for our banner ad, and..."

He faced his screen, ran his thumb over the trackball and found the story in seconds.

BREAKING NEWS:

Las Vegas Tour Bus Crash May Be Another Sniper Attack—At Least 10 Dead

A charter bus carrying over 50 Chinese tourists to Las Vegas plunged down an embankment off Interstate 15 northeast of Los Angeles early this morning and rolled several times before coming to rest in a culvert, leaving at least 10 dead and many injured. While they have not yet confirmed it, investigators on the scene say the driver may have been shot just prior to the accident...."

Luke thought he might gack up his coffee and that stale bear claw from the vending machine he'd wolfed down thirty minutes earlier. He forced himself to stand, grabbed his jacket to use as a towel and stumbled towards the office door.

"Maintain, maintain, maintain," he kept telling himself. It was there, the burning and the pressure, ready to surge up and out of his mouth if he let it, and when he finally bulled his way into the men's room and bounced off a wall into the nearest toilet stall, he was sure it would come, the physical manifestation of his reactive horror. But nothing happened, and after another minute of just standing there he went back to his desk and sat down.

"Unreal," he mumbled to himself.

Kristina slid up behind him. "Can you believe that shit? Like, how messed up is that, shooting at a tour bus? I mean, tell me how it works, the mind of such a sick and warped human being..."

"No, not a human being. A mouse...in a cage...killing other mice."

"Huh?" She leaned against a partition, sought his face with her own. "Is that from, like, a Soundgarden song?"

"No, not Soundgarden...from an e-mail I got on my web site. Some insane guy, talking about...about the future of mankind."

Brenda approached from the other direction, taking long strides in her brown culottes and some kind of airy shirt with doves embroidered on it. "Luke, when will that page go live? I've got a meeting with Gil in twenty minutes and I want to tell him the page is live."

Luke didn't look at her, just leaned forward on his desk and clicked on the tag that took him back to the draft page.

"Ten minutes, Brenda...ten minutes."

She walked off with a snort and he was able to do it in five, sending her an e-mail telling her the landing page was now live and that he was going home for the day with a severe migraine.

As he shambled through the parking lot Luke had to confront another demon that was now gnawing at his basal ganglia—he wanted a drink. No, not wanted—craved. Oh man that sounded good—an icy three-fingered shot of "the bird," a sweet unguent for his raw and oozing conscience. Climbing into his truck, speeding out of the lot and darting through heavy Westside traffic to get to San Vicente Boulevard, he knew he'd have to call Colin when he got home. Or simply indulge himself and bid a drunken farewell to nine years of clean-and-sober living.

But after turning onto Allenford to get to Sunset, Luke's Nokia sounded. He pulled it from inside his jacket, glanced at the screen: "Unknown Number."

He put it on speaker.

"This is Luke...."

Music in the background, Metallica's "Master of Puppets."

"See what you made me do, muthafucka?"

"pluto...."

"If there's a shitload of dead chinks on a bus, it must be Wednesday." He laughed.

"You did that..."

"Did you doubt me, Mandrake? Did you think I'd abandoned the mission?"

Luke pulled over to the curb and parked in front of a high school.

"No, I did not think that...pluto."

"Where was it?"

"Where was what?"

"That piece I sent you, asshole. You said you'd get right on it..."

"Hey, can you turn the music down...I can barely hear you."

There was a knock on the truck window and when he looked to his left he saw a Santa Monica police officer, young, his head shaved, motioning to him.

"Hang on..." Luke said to pluto, "there's a cop at the window of my truck."

Luke rolled the window down and the cop gave him a quick smile.

"Hi, officer, is there..."

"Yes sir, I'm glad to see you practicing safe cell phone procedure," the cop said, "but you're parked in a bus loading zone."

Luke wanted to say something like, "Well, sorry officer, but I've got the Southland Sniper on the line and I wasn't really paying attention to the curb sign." But instead he said, "Thanks, officer, I'll move my truck."

The cop smiled again, turned away, and Luke rolled up the window.

"Hey, pluto, did you hear that? Cop told me to move my vehicle."

"Cool," pluto said. "So move it...I'm not goin' anywhere...can't trace this cell anyhow."

Luke set the phone down, started the truck and drove into the school parking lot where he found a space. He saw a girl in a cheerleader's outfit who reminded him of Shana and that made him relax.

"Okay, so here's the deal, pluto," he said after a beat, his voice steadying. "I can't post it...the shit you sent me. In fact, I can't post anything else you send me."

A pause. Long. Just breathing. Loud. Then, "Hey, you know what, Mandrake...no, fuck it... I'm not gonna say it...I'm not gonna give you the pleasure of knowing. Of understanding. Dude, I am giving you _gifts_ , man...Occam's Razor...every fuckin' word! I thought you could see it...the subtext, you know...the codex! I thought you got it...what I...what this is all about!"

"I know what it's about, pluto. It's about a seriously disturbed guy with a gun killing people. Just that simple."

pluto laughed again, made a gulping noise, and his words became wet, fused into a rolling cadence with spittle and apparent inebriation.

"Wow, man. I am so fucking disappointed. See, that's where you... you can't protect yourself from prophecy, dude...from fate! You do not understand shit, Mandrake! I've been there! I've seen it...I've seen it all, motherfucker...right there in the middle of that flaming cesspool of evil and hate. And I've done it, dude. I've done the deed! The five fuckin' S's man...slow, smooth, straight, steady, squeeze...our mantra...the mantra of all cool killers everywhere. You think I've put up numbers here, dude...you can't begin to know how many fuckin' sand niggers I've...I've.... You know who the biggest mass murderer in history is, Mandrake?"

Luke sat there listening, calmed by a countervailing plan germinating in his head.

"No, pluto, I don't. Tell me."

"Fuck yes I'll tell you. Timothy fuckin' McVeigh! A hundred and sixty-eight humans...gone in a fertilizer-fueled flash! The dude had the shit, Mandrake, a former and revered _semper fi_ muthafucka...and he saw it...in the Gulf...Battle of Rumaila, man. He saw what went down, what was possible, what was inevitable. You see, dude, when you see Armageddon in action, you know it...you smell it...you hear it...the screams, man...the fuckin' screams...."

He was sobbing now, gurgling and sniffling over the speaker.

Luke stared at the Shana-look-alike chatting on the lawn with her friends fifty feet away and they finally noticed him, turned their backs and shuffled behind a wall, disappearing. He smiled to himself.

"Okay, pluto...okay. Apparently I've touched a nerve...."

"No, asshole," he yelled, "no nerves! I have no fuckin' nerves, dude! Just post my words, Mandrake! It's like McVeigh said... 'it's the nature of the beast...it's understood what the human toll will be.'"

Luke disconnected and appreciated the fact that he no longer had a craving to consume alcohol.

He drove home, brewed some coffee, and plunged into what would quickly become a work of painful atonement.

## ***

# Chapter 36

He reviewed and reread everything that pluto had sent him, scribbled a few notes, went online and did some research, perusing CNN, MSNBC, then a few web sites like _Human Rights First_ and _Human Rights Watch_ until he found the incidental info he needed to compose the following letter:

Attention Southland Sniper Task Force:

I have reason to believe that I have been in regular contact with the Southland Sniper over the past three weeks, in phone conversations and in written correspondence related to my line of work. Here are some identifying factors to apply in your investigation:

1) I believe the individual is a former member of the United States Marine Corps who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan in multiple tours and most likely participated in the civilian massacre at the Diyala Bridge in April, 2003.

2) He is a highly trained sniper and has accumulated numerous "kills" in his military career; also, he is likely suffering from extreme PTSD.

3) He is well-read, especially in Biblical and Zoroastrian texts, and may have espoused his ideas while in military service. He is also computer-savvy and is able to use multiple devices with ease.

4) He frequents various Starbucks stores in Southern California where he steals computers and cell phones.

5) He embraces the legacy of Timothy McVeigh.

6) He likes the movie Blade Runner and has cited scenes and dialogue from it in several instances.

7) He embraces ideas of population decimation and control and believes in the "value" of the Holocaust.

8) He may have been severely abused in his youth and may have killed his own father in an alleged hunting accident.

9) He may have spent a significant amount of time in rehab, either for an injury or an addiction.

10) He speaks with a strong mid-western accent, possibly from Chicago or Wisconsin.

I can say with certainty that this individual is intelligent, almost certainly a sociopath or psychopath, and extremely dangerous. I wish I could reveal more about the exact nature of our relationship but I fear for the safety of my family.

I hope you find this information helpful.

Regards,

A concerned citizen

Luke printed it out, used a pair of latex hospital gloves from a supply Peggi kept around for her wood refinishing and drove down to a post office in Culver City to mail it to the task force address posted on the LAPD web site.

But instead of going back home he went to the beach. Dockweiler, at the west end of LAX airport where he could wade in the surf and watch commercial jetliners roar into the western sky.

He took Culver Boulevard to Vista Del Mar and drove along the short sandy bluffs into a virtually empty lot, paid eight dollars to a squat Hispanic kid and parked. In a mild breeze, the white sun warm on his skin, Luke crossed the bike path and marched across fifty yards of sand to the Pacific Ocean where modest waves came in casual sets and splashed against a cement jetty that extended out about 90 feet into the topaz water.

A massive 777 in blue and white Korean Air livery wailed almost directly overhead and Luke watched the wide landing gear trucks disappear into the jet's underbody. He took off his sandals, waded into the chilly water and contemplated what he'd just done. His leads were substantial and if those guys on the task force had anything on the ball they'd be able to get a name and address in hours. Ultimately, that didn't mean much, Luke knew. If pluto managed to elude capture, things could get dicey.

"Fuck it," he said aloud, his eyes pointed south to the jagged silhouette of Santa Catalina Island barely visible in the offshore haze.

Hell, everything was dicey these days. Getting in your car and navigating L.A.'s crazy traffic was always dicey; roughly a dozen people a week died on L.A. county streets and highways. And those kids at Central Valley Community College; the only dicey thing they did that day was go to school. None of those victims could imagine that within a few hours their blood, brains and guts would be splattered all over a food court.

_How would it feel?_ Luke wondered, the instant when the slug from a .50 caliber rifle bore into him at 2000-feet-per-second. Would he see it, his heart hanging out of his chest attached by only a few torn veins and arteries? Would he feel his head exploding, like JFK's in the Zapruder film, bone and blood and tissue flying everywhere?

He stared out at a sailboat tacking majestically a few hundred yards offshore and remembered how he used to dream with his father about sailing around the world.

"I gotta do that," he said aloud. "If I ever get outta this shit, I gotta follow through on that."

After another ten minutes of morbid rumination he went back to his truck and drove home, almost comfortable with the idea that he might soon become a dead man walking.

## ***

# Chapter 37

Shana came over with Daryl that Thursday night as promised and tiptoed into the master bedroom just after 2 a.m., with Daryl passed out from too much Jagermeister and Humboldt weed.

Luke had been dozing but when she entered he roused himself and embraced her. She had on one of Daryl's robes, nothing else, and within minutes he was down on her, submitting to an impulse to lose himself in the fragrant folds of her vulva. She pulled a pillow over her face and moaned into it as Luke committed to the effort, his tongue aching from the nearly ten minutes of twisting, flicking, and lapping until she came to a convulsive climax. He rolled the condom on himself as she braced her legs apart and he slid inside her.

"God you're hot," he muttered repeatedly and Shana giggled.

"Well you're making me that way," she murmured.

They went through a few easy positions and she came again, braying into the pillow before he amped up the pounding, rolled the condom off and sprayed her back with his load.

He finished himself off as she stretched herself out beneath him, resting her head on her hands, her exquisite brown body exuding a shiny radiance in the ambient blue light from the DVR display.

"Wow," she said softly, "that was most excellent, kind sir."

"Yeah," he whispered. "I was in the mood."

"And then some."

They embraced again, her lips just inches from his ear.

"I want this," she whispered.

"Me too," he said quickly, not sure if he meant it. "But the way things are now, it's a tad awkward..."

"I'm done with him...Daryl."

"Done with him...what..."

"I'm gonna tell him tomorrow."

Luke hesitated, some random dark scenarios upsetting his afterglow.

"No. You can't."

She sat up abruptly.

"You don't want me to?"

"I didn't say that. But the timing..."

"The timing? Hey, come on, what about the timing of this...me sneaking in here to make love to you."

"Shana...shshshs, please."

"I thought you'd be really happy."

"What, happy that my stepson is about to get his heart crushed?"

"He...we...things aren't...they're not what they seem."

"Shana, some things have happened. Things I can't...that I can't talk about..."

"Well what kind of things?"

"Just...big things. But I can't..."

"Big things...mmm. What, like with someone else? Some other cunt you're fucking?"

She rolled out of bed and threw the robe back on.

Luke intercepted her as she darted for the door.

"Shshsh. No! Shana...listen to me. I'm in over my head with the website, okay. Some shit's happened, I can't go into it, but..."

"The website?"

"Gunsanity..."

"Dude, fuck the website. I'm talking about _us_...you and me. I just laid myself out here, you know...and you're freaking over a stupid blog."

She tried to pull away but he held her there.

"Listen, I want you, Shana. I want you like I've never wanted another woman. That alone scares the shit out of me. But right now, today, tonight...it's not fair to you. My head...I'm in a bad place...a dark place."

She tilted her face, locked eyes with him, probed for some veracity in the meager light by the door.

"You were in my pussy five minutes ago and that made you pretty goddamned happy...I thought. It was all so good. Now...shit."

She broke away from him, pulled the door open, marched back into what was once Britney's bedroom at the end of the hallway.

Luke could hear Daryl snoring as she opened the door and eased it closed behind her.

Okay, he thought to himself. It's okay. He can work it out with her later. Or not. He'd taken what he needed from her, for the time being, and he had to content himself with that.

After all, he might be dead in a few hours, so why worry?

## ***

# Chapter 38

Luke sat in the warm basement meeting room of the Lutheran church and listened to some screechy gnome talk about his life on the streets as a desperate drunk. Apparently George, that was his name, liked to offer his ass to anyone seeking sodomy in exchange for ten dollars so he could buy a few bottles of Ripple and a taco from the roach coach on Skid Row. That was twenty years ago, George was saying, and now he was selling pricy real estate in Bel Air, making a high six figures and living the good life, all thanks to AA.

Colin sat next to him and glanced at his watch as the leader began the liturgy of closing the meeting, reading "A Message for You," making some AA-related announcements, and cuing everyone to a moment of silence before standing and clasping hands to recite the Lord's prayer.

Afterwards in the pallid late-afternoon sunlight, attendees milled around on the sidewalk outside the white stucco worship hall and fired up their smokes. Luke found Colin engaging a mildly tawdry actress wannabe in her mid-20s who called herself Trish, his hand on her shoulder. She didn't seem to mind, since that was Colin's way with many of the women he sought out at the meetings, mostly as innocent flirtation, occasionally to offer sincere advice about calling him if they needed anything at all.

"Well there he is," Colin said as Luke sidled up beside him.

"Hey Colin, hey Trish, how's it going?"

She broke a smile and Luke noticed the wide gaps between her teeth.

"I see you at the Wednesday night meeting sometimes," she said to him. "You seem so serious all the time."

"It's just a veneer," Luke said with a weak grin. "Inside, I'm a laugh factory."

Her cell phone rang and she peeled away. "Oh, 'scuse me!"

Colin faced him. "You haven't called me in days, Mister Mandrake. Not a recommended strategy for my favorite sponsee."

"I know, I know, I...I've been seriously preoccupied." Luke began to rock mildly on his feet and peered down at his shoes. "But I'm wondering if you've got time for coffee...now?"

Colin winced, peeked at his watch again. "Gosh, I wish I did but I'm slated for babysitting duty tonight with my grandson. We're watching _The Lion King_...his first time. Is it serious?"

"Yeah, no, okay. I mean it is, but I'm okay...for now."

"Call me later tonight, say between nine and ten. He usually nods off around then...we can chat for a bit."

Luke shook his hand, made his way through a few acquaintances to the parking lot across the street and got into his truck. _Sure, Colin, whatever,_ he thought to himself. _I bet if Trish had needed to chat you'd have dropped the grandson in a heartbeat and met her for anything she wanted._

His impulse was to drive down to the Vons store on Wilshire, hustle into the liquor department and purchase a bottle or two of the bird. That was pretty much what he wanted to talk to Colin about, how the temptation to calm the maelstrom in his brain had become a fixation.

_Forget it,_ he told himself. _Go home and find something to do. Clean the spa. Water the dianthus patch. Feed the cats._

He pulled his Nokia from his jacket pocket and sought a text or a phone message from Shana. Nothing.

A bike ride. That might help. Wipe off the Cannondale, put some air in the tires and cruise the beach bike path. And be sure to wear that bullseye rugby shirt Peggi had given you once upon a birthday. Not that pluto would need it, with his skills.

_Ha, gallows humor, gotta love it,_ Luke mused to himself.

But when he got home he found Daryl yelling into his phone in the back yard, pacing around the birdbath in the midst of the dead rose bushes. Luke hung by the French doors concealed by the curtains, to eavesdrop.

"No...no...unacceptable!" Daryl was saying, dressed in tight black skinny jeans and a red "Coldplay" tee. He pressed the cell to his ear, his elbow cocked at a harsh angle. "You owe me more than that! Shit, I don't get it. One minute you're like all over me, and then it's like, fuck, I've got like AIDS or something!"

He paused, faced away from the house, and Luke opened the door a crack for optimal reception.

"I'm not doing this now. You fuckin' owe me! Everything I've done for you.... No, you listen to me...YOU LISTEN TO ME!"

Daryl stopped pacing, went into spasmodic gyrations as if to throw his cell at the wall of the garage, restrained himself, stomped his foot, and muttered something like "fucking bitch" at the ground.

Luke eased away from the door and padded to his study where he quickly pushed himself inside and went straight for the sofa where his cats roused themselves from their communal nap. He sat between them and rubbed his face.

Wild Turkey. The recollected sound of the amber fluid swirling from the classic bottle into a two-ounce shot glass flooded his brain again. The conjured fragrance of the potent sour mash titillated his nostrils. The synaptic imprint of that spicy burn in his throat as he flipped the glass to his lips made his mouth water.

_It could all be better in minutes,_ he knew. _Just jump in the truck, guide it to the Ralph's three blocks away and bring it on home. One bottle or two. Or three._

"Luke! Luke, are you home?" Daryl, yelling in the hallway.

Luke took a breath, opened the study door, wondered if his stepson knew everything now.

"Yeah, Daryl, I'm here. What's going..."

Daryl charged towards him. "I need to ask you something, dude!"

Luke thought about assuming some kind of Kung Fu stance. Not that he knew Kung Fu at all, but Daryl didn't know that. He could fake it, yell some bogus Japanese or Korean mantra to mitigate what could be a serious brawl in the hall.

"Fine, so ask." Luke came out to confront him.

"Dude...I need to borrow your truck. My Civic's in the shop and it's like a total emergency."

Luke stood there and measured the request. He made it a policy never to lend his truck, or pretty much anything else he owned, to anybody. Especially to a 21-year-old kid with a couple notable crashes under his belt and a driver's license that in Luke's mind was still in suspended mode.

"But you can't drive, I thought...."

"Dude, I can drive. I've had my license back for a month. I mean, if it's a big fuckin' deal I'll just call a cab, in which case I'll need $20 bucks...."

Luke understood the stakes and his own culpability in the ordeal. Apparently Shana had just told him she was done without giving specifics, like Luke's name, and Daryl wasn't taking it well.

"I promise I'll bring it back in like an hour...or two. I just need to see...to see somebody."

"Sure," Luke said abruptly, regretting it instantly. "Let me get you the spare key. You mind if I ask what..."

"Ah, shit, I don't wanna get into it...except to say that my girlfriend is a total cock-teasing bitch!"

"Okay."

Luke found the spare Toyota key in his desk and handed it to his seething stepson.

"Please drive it carefully," he said flatly.

Daryl plucked it from his fingers and managed an angry smile. "Sure thing, dude. I totally appreciate it. When I get back we'll all have some P-J pie, my treat!"

"Okay...sounds good."

He stood in the kitchen and watched Daryl through the thin dining room curtains as he started the truck, swerved backwards down the driveway and nearly slammed into the neighbors' black Beemer before speeding away.

## ***

# Chapter 39

" _A spokesperson for the Southland Sniper Task Force announced a substantial break in the case at his morning press conference but would not elaborate on the exact nature of the information. Lieutenant David Holsinger stated that an anonymous tip had pointed the investigation in a new direction and that further information would be forthcoming in the next few hours..."_

—Maria Delgado, KXLA news

Luke sat in the loveseat flipping through channels when he landed on the news report.

They got the letter.

An anonymous tip, they called it.

The investigation was now pointed in a new direction, they said.

A direction leading straight to Lucas Mandrake, most likely.

Again, the idea of that brown bottle overwhelmed him, compelled him to turn off the TV and stand up for no good reason, the Turkey calling to him in some drunken gobble gobble from a remote cage in his head.

Luke bounded up the stairs, threw on some jeans, a blue Polo and a black hoodie, found his Dodgers cap and slid his feet into some worn Topsiders.

He walked briskly, purposefully, head up, eyes straight ahead.

Fuck pluto, he declared silently. Fuck Joaquin Ruiz and all his victims. Fuck all the people in Los Angeles, especially the ones who'd died recently from a bullet to the chest or the head. Fuck gun control and NRA hysteria and the American creed of a well-armed militia. Fuck killers and victims everywhere.

Luke was now officially finished with his crusade and would celebrate this powerful nexus in his life with a party: organized by one, attended by one, and wildly celebrated by one.

He strode into the Ralph's supermarket and charged towards the liquor section. He knew exactly where to go, what aisle to assault, and he nearly knocked over an old man in a walker to get to the bourbon.

"Here we go," Luke muttered to himself, scanning the rows and stacks of honey-colored liquid.

Wild Turkey. 750 ml. The bird on the label in all its beautiful plumage. He wrapped his right hand around the bottle, yanked it from the shelf.

"Oh yeah...my beautiful bitch." Luke offering audible commentary to a confused and bewildered world, a running narrative of self-indulgent relief.

He heard the plangent Led Zeppelin ring tone of his Nokia and couldn't recall the act of stuffing the cell into his sweatshirt pocket ten minutes earlier.

_No, don't!_ a voice in his head intoned.

But he withdrew it, saw the "Unknown Number" on the screen.

Get it over with, douche-bag. Deal with it.

Luke stood near a window in the store, held the phone to his ear with his left hand, kept his right hand on the Wild Turkey bottle like a cudgel.

"Hello...."

No response.

"Hello?"

After a beat: "Yo...Fuck-drake. Wad up, my niggidy nig?" The words slow, meandering.

Luke glanced around, saw a couple shabby women cackling over the vodka brands a few feet away, turned his back to them.

"Hey...pluto."

"Dude...ever see that movie...that Dirty Harry vid?"

Something in his voice, a nuance that smacked of taunting. Luke set the Wild Turkey on a shelf next to some party mixers.

"Dirty Harry...sure...with Clint..."

"Yeah, yeah...Clint Badass. It was on last night, when they came."

That stabbing pain in his duodenum again, accented with a severe flush of the face. Luke winced and scanned for the store's exit.

"When who came, pluto?"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN, ASS-DRAKE!"

A baboon backed into a corner, Luke thought. He held the cell away from his face.

"When who came, pluto?" he repeated.

"I'm tellin' you, aw-right. So I'm watchin' it, right, and it's that part when the bad guy, the sniper dude, he's got Dirty Harry on the run with the bag full'a money, makin' him dash from phone to phone, hubba hubba, to save the girl who's dead already, and that's when the flash-bangers go off, I can hear 'em down below, and I know it's zero-shit-thirty, man."

Luke's mind raced as he strode out of the supermarket and worked to connect some dots. It'd been less than a week since he'd mailed the letter and he figured it would take time for the task force to peruse databases, interview people, run search routines, cross-check leads, collate and match photos, or whatever they had to do to find human needles in a criminal haystack.

"But see, I'm too good. I'm just too fuckin' good, Fuck-Drake. My exit strategy...fuckin' spot-on. Always gotta have an exit strategy."

"Who came for you, pluto?"

"Dude, the news is everywhere. Don't play the naïve fuckin' narc with me. Anyhow, Dirty Harry, he finally reaches the bad guy at the cross with the money, and mayhem ensues. So I kind'a got inspired, and now, well...hubba hubba, Narc-drake. Hubba fuckin' hubba."

Disconnection.

Then, some disorientation. After which, as he ran through the Ralph's parking lot and sprinted across Sunset Boulevard, Luke succumbed to the ultimate distraction of knowing he was now in pluto's crosshairs.

## ***

# Chapter 40

" _What we're seeing is some very blurry video of what appear to be flashes or explosions at a rural home in Lancaster, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles, where authorities believed the Southland Sniper might have been staying, and where a Sheriff's Department SWAT team forcibly entered last night. Two men were taken from the home but we've just learned that neither man is now believed to be a suspect in the series of attacks that have terrorized drivers in Southern California over the past four months...."_

Luke turned away from the Channel 7 news report and went back out to the porch to call Shana again. Straight to voicemail.

He sent her a text: "Please let me know waz up. Need to talk ASAP!"

He called Daryl's number. No answer. Voicemail.

"Dude, where the hell's my truck? I need it for work tomorrow!"

That was the message.

It was just after 11 p.m. and Luke sat in the porch swing with both his cats skulking through the dead rose garden and sniffing the air. Luke, too, sniffed the air, or more precisely, smelled the scent of something dead. The acrid sour cheese odor of necrotic flesh, the bloated remnants of some neighborhood mammal that had crawled into the boxwood hedge to die. Or was it Luke's own optimism, his recently rejuvenated pride that was now dead and putrefying in the ambient fog?

They knew who pluto was now but that didn't mean shit if he could still perch somewhere and shoot his big rifle at some unlucky driver—or a treacherous blogger. No, he wasn't in that mode now, Luke determined. He was inspired, he said. By Dirty Harry. Go ahead, make my fuckin' day.

He tried calling Shana and Daryl a couple more times each with no luck before laying down on his sofa and waiting. The entire house was dark and he could hear his cats chasing each other up and down the stairs. Amazing how fast Exene could still run, he thought to himself.

That's what it was now. Suspended in a dreadful limbo, a kind of time-out in what was sure to become a more contentious endgame.

Twenty minutes later, his Nokia rang.

"pluto."

"Dude, tell me what's been cookin' with you and the little hottie?"

Luke sat up, fought the urge to puke, a worst-case scenario come to life in his ears.

"I...I dunno what you mean."

"C'mon, Mandrake, I been scannin' her texts...she's got a sweet little iPhone...and you been calling like five times."

"Just tell me they're alive."

"Hey, I'll tell you what the fuck I wanna tell you, when I tell you. Are we clear on that?"

He sounded manic, either high or saturated with caffeine. Luke stood up, went into the kitchen, turned on a light. He realized he had no saliva in his mouth and his legs were trembling. He sat on a chair at the table thinking he might faint.

"Yeah, okay...we're clear."

"They're good. Real chatty, in fact. So fuckin' chatty I had to shut 'em up. But enough about them."

"But they're okay, right? You didn't...they're not hurt...in any way."

Silence.

"pluto...you still there?"

Still nothing.

"Dude, why me? I'm just...I just write a shitty little blog..."

"Yeah, Fuck-drake...why you. Why my old man, you know? Why those goddamned sand niggers and carpet kissers? Man, it is what it is, my friend. Fate. Samsara. Maya. _San-chit-andra,_ man!"

"So, what..."

"Okay, here's what, Dick-drake. You move. When I tell you to move. Hubba hubba. I'm guessing you're a tango now. Shit, this call's probably on speaker in a room full'a feds...."

"No! I'm alone. I'm all alone."

"Yeah, whatever. So listen up. You're gonna grab a cab to Union Station downtown. Be there by eight a.m. and keep your cell handy. I'll give you new marching orders then. If I see you're not solo, like blues on your ass, then you can listen in on me smokin' those kids."

"pluto, can I..."

"Shut the fuck up! YOU TURNED ON ME, MOTHERFUCKER!"

"You don't know that!"

"Hey, I know everything, Ass-drake. I know everything there is to know about how shitty people get when they want what they want! But you know what? I'm down with it. My bad. Lessons learned. So we're gonna have some fun, you and me. And when it's over, you'll know. You'll have the codex. The secret to my success. You'll be like fuckin' Nostradamus...with tunnel vision to the future."

Gone.

Luke spent a couple minutes adjusting to the idea that he was now at the mercy of a psychopathic killer, and that he, his stepson, and his stepson's girlfriend who also happened to be _his_ girlfriend, might very well be dead within the next few hours.

He surprised himself with his own stoicism, his acceptance of a fate that would certainly involve some kind of violent epiphany. But maybe he'd suspected this outcome for weeks, from the moment he posted that silly video and opened his life to the mindset of a gun-crazed humanity.

That's when he finally heard her, Exene, mewing demurely as she hobbled up to him and sat on her haunches, her penny-sized yellow eyes imploring him to man-up and show some love before embarking on what was probably the final day of his life.

## ***

# Chapter 41

In a white Dodge Ram van parked a few houses down on Finch Street, Special Agent Winkle sat on a compact folding stool behind the two cellular intercept console operators in a cramped space lit by a hundred LED lights from racks of telephonic gear.

He polished off the last few drops from a Coke can and thought about what he'd tell his boss. They'd recorded the conversation and were able to track the origin to a cell tower in Valencia. They knew the phone belonged to one Shanette "Shana" Octavia Lemond and would soon end up smashed in a garbage can like all the others.

It was only a matter of hours before they would either capture or kill Kevin Lee Nugent, _aka_ David Lee, _aka_ John Dayton, _aka_ "pluto." But now the scenario was complicated by the hostage situation and Winkle was still fuming over the fact Nugent had eluded their botched operation the night before in Lancaster 65 miles to the northeast.

He switched his headset over to the secure cell channel and ordered his thoughts before hitting the two-digit code.

"Winkle here. Put me through to Levin."

A pause. "This is Levin."

"Rick, it's going down now for sure...and he's got hostages."

"Christ..."

"Yeah. He'll be using Mandrake and there's linkage so we'll need spotters."

"Roger that."

"As we discussed—no locals, just us and ATF with Jain in charge. I'll be back in an hour to revise the AP."

He disconnected and yanked off his headset.

The two younger agents faced him, the nearest kid, Aaronson, pulling his off as well.

"Sir...I gotta piss."

Winkle glanced his way, turned his eyes to his dry, chapped hands.

"Yeah...ditto. You guys up for Tommy's burgers? On me."

The other agent, Mendes, much heavier, dropped his headset and grinned. "Fuck yeah."

## ***

# Chapter 42

"Danny, I'm in big trouble."

It was 6:10 a.m. and Luke knew his friend would be up and eating breakfast. He'd called the Yellow Cab people a couple minutes earlier and they said a car would be there by 6:15. Then he called Danny.

"Talk to me, man."

"Some shit's gone down...happened. Some very serious shit."

"Okay, like how serious? What, you kill somebody?"

"No...not like that...but in the neighborhood."

"You drinkin' again, Luke?"

"No, Danner, though I want to. God how I want to. Just tell me...I know you hate to talk about it, but I need to know."

"Okay, what? Need to know..."

"You told me once you...you were in a situation, you almost died, you had like...like a moment...."

Luke stood at the dining room window and heard Danny talking to someone, then a door shutting.

"Sorry, dude, but Jasmine's running around in her bra and panties and I don't need that distraction, know what I mean? Yeah, I had a moment. I had alotta moments."

Luke had that sensation again in his throat, a squeezing that made him cough. "Just tell me how...how you kept it together, Danner. How you survived..."

"How I survived? It wasn't survival, Luke-mon, it was fuckin' luck. That's all it was. I saw two of my buddies go down right next to me in a friendlies firefight and they were really messed-up. I didn't get a scratch. How does that happen? The thing is, you can never assume the worst about any situation. That's the one thing I learned, the one thing that kept me going out there in the shit. Anything can happen, and you can never really know what it is 'til it does."

Luke saw the yellow taxi motor past, slow, stop, and back up.

"So, what...just hope that..."

"It's not about hope, dude. It's about fate. If you can get past the fear, and the panic, and the dread, you realize it's out of your control. So why fuckin' worry, you know?"

"Yeah...like the AA mantra."

"What's that?"

"Stay in the moment, one day at a time...give yourself over to your higher power."

"Higher power-schmower. It's luck man. Really, bottom line, that's all it is."

"Danny, my cab's here."

"Your cab? Shit, man, sounds ominous."

"Yeah. I guess you could say I'm on a mission."

"A mission, huh. Well, call me when the mission's accomplished."

"Sure thing, Dan-o. Or, you'll just read about it."

He disconnected.

Luke was ready to go in his walking Vans, a grey polo, brown cargo shorts, and a white painter's cap, a 12-ounce bottle of Aquafina stuck in a cargo pocket. He'd managed to sleep for a couple hours, dreaming of his dead parents and drinking beer with his father, but his eyes burned and he brewed his morning coffee extra strong. He waved at the cabbie from the window and made sure his cats had plenty of kibble and water before running outside.

The cabbie could've been Mexican, or Turkish, and had a glossy sheen on his bald head.

"How much to Union Station?" Luke asked him flatly.

"Mmm...maybe thirty...thirty-five. What the meter says."

"We need to stop at my bank."

"It might go to forty then."

"Fine...go."

The car slid out of the driveway and Luke braced himself on the back door.

They stopped at a Chase ATM in Brentwood where Luke withdrew $100 and told the cabbie to take the freeways as much as possible.

"They're all bad now in the mornings, sir. Full of traffic...bad traffic."

"Just do it, please. Take the 10 to the 110 to the 101 southbound and get off at Alameda. You can find it from there."

"Okay, sir, I go that way in horrible traffic."

Luke pulled his cell out and sent a quick text to his brother John: "Hey Bro—Happy Wed. Just FYI, if I die today please handle my estate as we discussed last month—and take care of MY CATS! Have a good one!"

He added a smiling emoticon and knew it might trigger a phone call from John but that was the least of his concerns now.

Then he called the office, left a brief message for Brenda that he was ill and wouldn't be in today. He was tempted to add "...or ever, for that matter."

_What the fuck,_ he thought to himself. Clarity. He liked that word. His chat with Danny had helped him a lot, had given him clarity. He hated his day job and needed to get out of there. Let them fire his ass. At least he could collect EDD for a while, assuming he still had his brains and body intact after today. He made sure the Nokia's ringer was set to loud and on vibrate and slid it into his sweatshirt pocket.

Traffic wasn't nearly as bad as the cabbie had wanted it to be and they pulled into the Union Station parking lot at 7:52 a.m. The classic mission-style building had always appealed to Luke's architectural sensibilities but today it had the aspect of a giant mausoleum and only the few taxis idling in front gave it any vibrancy at that hour.

The jowly driver turned and pointed at the meter.

"Little more than forty," he said.

"Yeah, whatever."

Luke got out, dug into his wallet, gave the guy $45 and walked into the vast terminal where a few commuters and vagrants already sat in the dark deco wood chairs. He went straight to the men's room to relieve himself and thought about hitting a stall to make sure he wasn't on the verge of some debilitating diarrhea attack. But the minor cramps passed and he headed back out into the lobby.

"Stay in the moment, asshole," he muttered to himself. "Just stay in the fuckin' moment...."

He wanted some coffee from the Starbucks near the platforms but didn't want to have to piss again in ten minutes. The anxiety was there, he couldn't deny that, but it wasn't overwhelming, and he managed to admire the massive chandeliers suspended like ornate flying saucers from the angled, open-beamed ceiling.

The Led Zeppelin riff startled him. He pulled out the phone, walked to the nearest wall and faced it.

"Luke here."

"I got laid last night, Ass-Drake."

Luke had a thought, choked on it, stammered. "Jeezuz, pluto, you didn't hurt...assault..."

"Fuck off, man...no, I didn't take liberties with your bitch, tho' she _is_ fairly smokin'."

"Yeah...no...okay..."

"A little Thai hooker I know. Rocked my fuckin' socks off."

Luke breathed long and deep as commuters bustled behind him. "I'm happy for you, dude."

"Bullshit. You in the station?"

"Yes. Yes I am."

"I know you are."

Luke glanced around, scanned the sparse crowd for anyone else who might be on a cell.

"Okay, real simple," pluto went on. "The next Red Line train to North Hollywood leaves in eight minutes. Be on it. Take it all the way. I'll call you on Lankershim. Don't fuckin' dilly-dally."

Gone.

The game was on, Luke knew, and he ran down the stairs to the Metro ticket machines.

## ***

# Chapter 43

"Okay, the jag-off wants to play, let's play," Luke mumbled as he made his way to the schedule marquee to get his bearings. Two minutes later he passed through the turnstiles to descend another set of stairs to the waiting train.

It was then that he noticed them, a man and a woman keeping their distance but walking when he walked, stopping when he stopped. They seemed young, collegiate, and even kissed when he glanced their way, but he was aware of them now and he hustled inside the train.

He found a seat in the empty car and after another three minutes the train began to roll. The collegiate couple had boarded the car behind his, sitting only about twenty feet away.

Luke had ridden the Red Line once before, with Peggi on a Saturday a couple years earlier when they'd decided to explore the city's rail system and hike up to the Griffith Park Observatory. He remembered how subterranean it felt, how New York-ish, but he'd forgotten how fast it went and for a few minutes he was actually distracted by the sensation of whooshing through an underground tunnel at what seemed like 80 or 90 miles per hour.

He glanced behind him and saw the couple sitting idly in the trailing car, the girl's eyes shifting away from him.

The train made several stops: Macarthur Park, Wilshire/Vermont, Vermont/Santa Monica, Hollywood and Western. At Hollywood and Highland the couple got off and Luke began to doubt himself again. The car turned crowded, a hefty white girl with piercings through her lips sat next to him, and a black guy with earphones who seemed to be texting maneuvered close to Luke's seat and stood there.

The car rocked gently at high speed, traversing the longest stretch without stops under the Hollywood Hills until the announcement came: "Next and final stop, North Hollywood; all passengers must exit...."

The train eased to a stop and Luke got to his feet, gained his stride down the platform towards the escalators and noticed the black guy keeping his distance behind him. He put his hand on his wallet reflexively, checked his other pocket for this Nokia, made sure he still had his water.

He took three long escalators up, padded out of the odd funnel-shaped station through streams of zombie morning commuters, and adjusted to the sharp morning light on Lankershim Boulevard. The black guy had disappeared and he felt anonymous among the throng of people surrounding him.

His ringtone sounded and he answered it.

"Yo Fuck-drake, I been calling you. You on the street?"

"Yeah...yes...yes I am."

"Sweet."

"pluto, you need to tell me how they're doing...the kids..."

"Hey, I don't need to tell you shit, aw-right? I heard 'em moaning a while ago...that's all you need to know."

"Are you...are you following me?"

"Dude, just shut the fuck up and listen. You're catching a bus now, the 154 to the downtown Burbank Metro station. Same thing; anyone with you, any birds in the air or boots on the ground, I'm takin' names. I'll call you in forty-five and you better fuckin' be there!"

"pluto, hey!..."

Disconnected.

Luke slid the phone into his pocket, glanced around, saw the depot a hundred yards away and an orange Metro bus pulling into a bay.

Shit, that could be it. He broke into a trot, crossed Lankershim against the light, dodged more commuters as they hustled towards the buses rumbling in and out of their parking bays, air brakes hissing. Sweat dripped into Luke's eyes as he scanned the LED marquees. He reached the door of the first bus as it closed.

"I'm looking for the 154 to Burbank!"

The porcine black driver barely acknowledged him. "Next one over."

Luke spun around, nearly tripped on the curb, stumbled into the Metro bus and faced a grim white woman in her 50s at the wheel.

"How much...the fare?"

"One seventy-five."

He found a couple one's in his wallet, slid them into the meter and sought a seat near the back door. Seconds later a white guy in black cargo shorts and a blue Nike tee dropped coins in the slot and made eye contact with him as he shambled past and sat in the very back.

As the bus rocked down Magnolia Boulevard Luke lost himself in recollections of Shana, the montage of images and sensations from their lovemaking antics just days earlier. Her smell, that blend of lavender and henna and shellfish, her pliant labia smooth and warm against his eager tongue. Not love. No. Emotional, yes. Fraught with emotion, coping with performance failure, and the fear of it, then triumph, the euphoria of conquest, of ejaculation, and ensuing manly pride. But not love.

When had he loved last? When had he succumbed to the wrenching agony of romantic love? With Diana, of course, nearly three decades earlier. Their courtship had been a maelstrom of crippling rejection, relentless pursuit, pleading, exposure, capitulation, cajoling, and finally, penetration. Eight years of marriage and the fight that pretty much ended it all, the night they got drunk on zinfandel and she screamed obscenities at him, how insensitive and distant and callous he'd become in his pursuit of Hollywood glory until her vagina began to hemorrhage and her womb loosed and expelled the five-week-old fetus on their bathroom floor, barely a mote in the drunken father's eye, his only child.

Luke shook himself out of it, realized the bus was pulling into the long driveway of the Burbank Metro Station. He hesitated to let the white guy in black cargos get off first but when he turned he saw that the guy was gone. He must've got off at the previous stop and Luke hadn't noticed.

He glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost 9:30 and maneuvered himself onto the sidewalk to face three sets of train tracks and roadbed running under the high Olive Avenue overpass.

A warm breeze and his simmering trepidation made his skin damp as Luke trundled towards the modest green deco structure that housed a bank of vending machines, a bathroom, and an elevator. A few people stood on the low cement platform or sat on the polished chrome mesh benches under arched green awnings.

His cell rang and he pulled it from his left front pocket.

"pluto?"

"Nice timing, Fuck-drake. And nice outfit...so gay."

He was here! Luke glanced around reflexively: at the railing on the overpass, at the commuter parking lot on the other side of the tracks.

"Okay, where are..."

"Just keep it chill. You can't see me, I'm sure of that. You know you're being tailed, right?"

"No...no, no way, I've been checking..."

"Checking your ass, maybe. Okay, listen up. Here's where the fun starts. The Chatsworth Metrolink is due in about ten minutes. You're gonna buy a ticket and when the train pulls in, it'll stop for about thirty seconds. Soon as that door opens, you get on. Keep your phone handy. Got it?"

Luke reacted to a wave of vertigo and sat on a short wall. "Yeah, sure...I got it."

"You blow it, the kids die, that simple."

"Okay...okay."

Gone again.

Luke marched towards the ticket machine twenty yards away and imagined himself in pluto's crosshairs, the scope trained on his head and the impact of that .50 caliber bullet turning his brains into wet red confetti. He wanted to whimper, to release the immense tension squeezing his esophagus but feared it might startle the few commuters milling around nearby.

He reached the boxy dispenser, read a short list of instructions and went through the routine of pressing buttons and scrolling through menus. Shit! He had to start over. Finally, a prompt telling him to pay. He dug for his wallet, pulled out a twenty, slid it into the slot. A delay, then jackpot! Nine one-dollar coins and two quarters. Change! Along with the ticket. Luke stuck his trembling hand into the bin to retrieve it all.

The signal at the pedestrian walkway began to clang. Luke stood, fought his nausea and hustled down the quick flight of stairs to the platform where he noticed a half-dozen other people, including a woman 30 feet away with a backpack and wearing black cargo shorts, just like that white guy on the bus. She had on a Yankees ball cap and was talking into a cell phone. Was she looking at him?

He turned and saw the dingy white locomotive bearing around the long bend in the tracks three hundred yards away, pulling four white double-decked cars.

_Don't blow it, don't blow it, don't blow it_ ran like a chant through his head as he padded towards the tracks and the train's horn bellowed one, two, three times. The growling engine slowed from 40 to 30 to 10 miles per hour and rumbled past him. Brakes squealed, the cars stopped, and he sidestepped over to a wide access door on the center commuter car.

A loudspeaker announced: "This train goes to Chatsworth. Chatsworth."

The door slid open and a hefty Hispanic woman pushed past him into the car. Luke took a step up and into the threshold.

His ringtone sounded and he answered it.

"Okay, I'm..."

"Get off! Get off now!"

Luke could feel his body jerk as he forced himself off the train.

A bell sounded and the door closed.

To his left he saw the Yankees ball-cap woman peer at him from her perch on the step of the other door and she, too, got off.

Damn, pluto was right! They'd been handing him off, the couple at Union Station, the black dude at the Red Line platform, the white guy on the bus, now her.

The horn blasted again and the brakes released. The train began to roll and the woman held her cell to her face as she looked at Luke awkwardly twenty feet away. She turned and began to walk, the train receding in the distance behind her, and Luke stood motionless until he heard the thud. She hurtled back about five feet and her pack exploded in a red mist. The Yankees cap flew off and she hit her head hard as her body flopped on the ground.

What blond hair she has, Luke thought to himself. He stared at her as she convulsed briefly, then died.

His impulse was to help her until he heard honking and saw a yellow and green taxi cab at the curb, the driver beckoning anxiously to him.

"Get in here...now!"

Luke ran to the Ford Taurus and the back door flew open.

"Get the fuck in here and hit the deck!"

Luke had no time to surmise the driver. He dove into the back seat as the car jolted forward and the door slammed.

"Give me your cell!"

"What?"

"Your phone, give it to me!"

Luke dug for his Nokia, held it up.

The driver grabbed it and Luke could hear the whoosh of wind as a window rolled down.

"Track that, assholes!"

A throwing motion, then laughter.

"Yes! Center fucking shot! Stay down, Fuck-drake!"

The harsh driving began and Luke could hear sirens, and a helicopter.

Centrifugal force jammed his head into the left rear door handle and his right knee into a seat belt buckle on the passenger seat. "Ouw, shit!"

He gasped for air, his throat constricted, and he knew he'd be puking soon.

The driver cackled as he accelerated, braked, turned hard to the right, to the left, braked again, accelerated.

"Sweet! That was so fucking sweet! Just stay the fuck down there, Mandrake!"

He heard pounding against the rear seat from the trunk, relentless.

The driver hollered. "Knock it off, Abdul, or I'll cap your ass!"

Luke struggled to quell his dry heaves as his face sought coolness against the seat's upholstery.

"I'm getting sick back here, pluto!"

He said it. His name.

"Then get sick...not my car. Okay, we gotta move fast. Try anything and you're dead...and so are they."

"I won't try anything!" Luke pushed himself up as the car eased to a stop and the driver door opened. The pounding from the trunk continued and Luke could hear it now, the mash-up of crying and cursing in some middle-eastern lilt.

"You fucking mutherfucking asshole mutherfucker!" the voice bellowed.

"Get out, Mandrake, now!"

Luke swung his legs out and stood up, coming face-to-face with what looked like a red soccer ball wearing aviator sunglasses and a black beret. He shirked back.

"Move!" pluto yelled, his mouth a narrow slit without lips, his nose a flap of skin with two large holes at the base.

Again, the harsh pangs of nausea, and his heart roiling in his chest.

_Flee!_ his brain told him _, just fucking run!_

But he couldn't run. He could only obey.

## ***

# Chapter 44

Luke felt a hard poke in his lower back as pluto guided him towards a primer-gray Jeep Wrangler parked across the street, the tattered top crisscrossed with duct tape and Metallica stickers. He turned, saw that they were now under an overpass in an industrial area with pluto a couple steps behind him cradling a compact, Uzi-looking assault weapon fitted with a long silencer.

"Move your ass, Fuck-drake!" he barked.

Without warning, a horrible knot in his gut compelled Luke to double over and vomit abruptly, bringing up mostly bile and what remained of his morning coffee.

"Jeezuz, what a pussy," pluto mumbled as he grabbed Luke's shirt and pulled him to the passenger side of the Jeep. "Get the fuck in there!"

pluto pushed the seat forward and Luke crawled into the back compartment littered with gallon water jugs and boxes of breakfast cereal.

"She's all yours, Abdul!" pluto yelled as he fired a quick burst of rounds at the taxi, blowing out the tires. He tossed the weapon in the Jeep and in seconds pluto was behind the wheel, driving.

"I'm...I'm still sick," Luke stammered.

"Don't toss it in here, douche!" pluto shot back.

Luke braced himself against the seat as pluto drove, not so harshly now, and from the freeway signage he knew they were on the 405 southbound. He rolled on top of a couple boxes of Frosted Flakes, pulled his cap off and ran his hands over his wet face. He took a few deep breaths, listened to the wind whistling through the Jeep's patchwork top and kept his eyes focused out the front windshield.

"You need to relax, Fuck-drake. You need to take five and just chill, my bruth'a." pluto turned on the radio and some rock ballad blared through the speakers near Luke's head, "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. "How's that sound? A hundred-twenty watts of JBL power...installed 'em myself!"

Luke sat up, pulled his cap back on, began to order his thoughts.

"I need to know if they're okay," he shouted over the music.

pluto turned it down.

"I sure the fuck hope so," he chirped over his shoulder. "They're kind of on their own. On the honor system, you might say."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means shut the fuck up and enjoy the ride."

"You killed her, that agent...at the Metro station."

"Damn straight I nailed that bitch, me and my trusty H-K." He stroked the black weapon on the console as if it were a puppy. "Dude, I am the LeBron James of all fucking name-takers. I once pegged a san' monkey in the sternum from two-thousand-three-hundred-and-nine yards. We GPS'd it...guys in my squad couldn't fuckin' believe their eyes. Only they couldn't see it with their eyes 'cause the guy was over a mile away. Fuckin' bullet dropped a hundred feet and I still zero'd him."

Luke sat there and absorbed the fact that he was being driven up the long incline of the ten-lane 405, passing the spot near the Mulholland Drive bridge where pluto had killed Peggi four months earlier. The major irony of the moment made him dizzy and nauseous again and he was sure he'd lose it until he leaned forward and the wind slapped his face.

Never assume the worst. That's what Danny had told him just hours earlier. Luke struggled to come out of his sickly torpor, to assess the situation and find some advantage. The wind felt good on his skin as he studied the guy at the wheel in a black Metallica T-shirt, stringy hair blowing over mottled scar tissue around the neckline. He had on baggy jeans flapping over black high-top boots.

"You up for a little hike, my bruth'a?" pluto yelled over the wind noise.

"Do I have much of a choice?" Luke answered, almost petulant.

"Oh hell ya! You got all the choice in the world. Just say the word and I'll boot your ass out...free to go on your merry fuckin' way."

Luke began to put things together. Daryl and Shana were someplace secure, pluto's last bargaining chips in a game he knew he could never win outright but that he could easily prolong. There was resignation in his voice, the kind of insouciant laughter that comes from someone convinced of a bad outcome, like gallows humor. Luke got the same laugh from his mother as she leaned on the kitchen counter five years earlier, her body ravaged by cancer, and yet in her thick green terry bathrobe she continued to smoke her Salem 100s with awkward grace, inhaling the smoke deep and coughing up blood repeatedly after every puff.

"No, I'm in this!" Luke declared, and pluto cackled again.

"Of course you're in this, Fuck-drake."

"pluto, hey. Enough with the 'Fuck-drake' bullshit, aw-right? You call me Luke, my name. Do me that favor."

He could see pluto's face in the rearview canted up to appraise him, the aviator glasses covering his mutant eyes.

"Yeah, good for you, Mandrake. Stand up and be counted. Assert yourself. Finally."

pluto steered right and guided the Jeep down the Mountaingate offramp.

He knew this area, had ridden a bike here decades ago, back when he considered himself strong and athletic, he and his pal Dave torturing themselves with the hard push up the steep, twisting Mountaingate Drive where pluto now drove the Jeep.

"Ain't this nice? All green an' shit? Dude, when I was in the Bugdad and humpin' through the shit, trees were as dirty as the desert, coated in the same brown devil dust that covered everything else."

"Thanks for sharing." That's it, Luke, be sarcastic. Get your edge back. Don't let him see how terrified you really are.

They passed a cop coming down the hill, one of those home security patrol cars. pluto didn't seem phased, kept pushing the whining Jeep up the hill until the road leveled off amidst pricey townhouses, condos, and well-kept homes that fringed a golf course.

"Up for some golf, Mandrake? I hate golf...bunch'a arrogant cocksuckers and their putters. Assholes...."

pluto whipped the Jeep through a quiet neighborhood where squads of ethnic gardeners maintained immaculate lawns.

They left the housing tract and dipped down into low, scrubby hills. Luke saw a sign, Stony Hill Road, that ended at a steel-bar gate, and the Jeep braked hard.

"Just stay put, Luke-ster," pluto said as he hopped out of the idling vehicle and went to the gate. He leaned over the latch and in seconds it swung open. He got back into the Jeep and ground it into gear, accelerating, knocking Luke's head against the roll bar.

The road narrowed, turned to gravel and Luke could catch glimpses of the 405 freeway snaking through the Sepulveda Pass off to the left, about a half-mile away and below them.

"You're not telling me much, pluto," Luke said, clearing his throat and amplifying his voice with some effort. "I mean, your rants were full of, you know, information...."

"Relax, dude. We're almost there. Then you'll know everything. Everything."

Again, that irritating guffaw.

Luke reacted to his distracting thirst and reached for the Aquafina bottle he'd stuffed into his shorts. But it was gone, lost in the recent chaos. He saw the open case of Arrowhead mini-bottles at his feet and reached for one.

"Yeah, just help yourself to my stash without asking, fuck-face!" pluto hollered as he drove.

Luke glanced at the rearview mirror. "I'm thirsty!"

The Jeep accelerated as pluto slid it around curves and down narrow straightaways. He turned sharply to the left and they dipped down an incline into a stand of eucalyptus trees.

The Jeep skidded to a stop. pluto killed the engine and climbed out.

"Okay, let's move."

Luke got to his knees, unfolded himself out of the Jeep, stood up and stretched. As pluto did a quick 360 security check, Luke was able to take him in, a man about 5'7" or 5'8", a slight pot belly but otherwise average body, with that disfigured face, keloid tissue marring his spindly right arm but his left arm thick and unblemished except for a tattoo Luke couldn't read. His left front jean pocket bulged with the outline of what looked like a pistol.

"Grab me some water," he said and Luke obliged, reaching back into the Jeep for two small bottles.

"Are they here?" Luke posed firmly.

"Who? Oh...fuck no. They're miles from here. Miles." pluto shuffled up to him and snatched the water bottles away. "Follow me. And just a reminder...you bolt and they're dead."

Luke noted the time on his cheap watch—10:44 a.m.—and in the ambient heat appreciated the shade of the trees. pluto started to walk with a noticeable limp that he'd obviously compensated for because his pace was quick. Luke followed him down into a copse of poplars, ducking low to avoid twigs and overhangs.

He heard a helicopter and looked up but couldn't see anything through the leafy branches.

His senses turned acute and the warm scent of pine and eucalyptus singed his nose. Shadow and sunlight comingled to produce an hallucinating effect on the narrow trail and Luke realized his adrenaline had become an amphetamine, enhancing his perceptions in what he figured was probably a death march.

## ***

# Chapter 45

"I know it's you who fucked me," pluto blurted over his shoulder as they hiked. "I mean, I knew I couldn't stay a ghost forever but I had a hunch you might turn on me so I had to go into stealth mode. Sure 'nuff, they raid my step-dad's place, turn everything inside out, bring in choppers and dogs and a fuckin' convoy of SWAT geeks to haul him away and I'm watchin' the whole thing from my toy hauler on a hill a mile away. So then I gotta strategize."

Luke needed to defend himself in what had already become a highly informal and potentially lethal kangaroo court of one. "How could I turn you in when I don't even know your real name, pluto?"

"Dude, come on, I'm no 'tard. You know shit which any half-wit cop could run in a database. So anyhow, I pack up my gear and take a leisurely drive to your neighborhood. And damn-it, I thought for sure it was you in that fuckin' truck when I hit it at the pier."

"The pier..."

"I'd staked you out, dude, glassed you many-a-time. I thought, this guy rats me out, I'll just add him to the tally in typical fashion, know what I'm sayin'. But then, shit...I guess I got soft. So I tailed the truck down to Venice Pier, thinkin' I'd snatch you for some fun and games, and shazam, that dip-shit kid gets out to hook up with the little chocolate hottie on the beach. Dude, the look on their faces when they eyeballed me.... I get that look a lot, as you can imagine. Donny...what a little chicken-shit..."

"You mean Daryl? His name's Daryl."

"Daryl, Donny, Dickhead...dude almost started cryin' when I pulled my Ruger. It was the girl, she got feisty. I had to cold-cock her to get her to move."

"You hit her?" Luke's face flushed and he clenched his fists.

"Hey, she was lucky I didn't cut her. I had my Buck at the ready and any loud shit at all and I was gonna minister some swift containment, know what I'm sayin'?"

"You didn't hurt her..."

"Yeah, I fuckin' hurt her...enough to get her to shut up. She's tough."

They reached a small clearing and pluto stopped abruptly.

"And they're around here somewhere?"

"I told you, Fuck-drake..."

"Hey!" Luke yelled at him. "It's Luke! I call you pluto, you call me Luke, got it? That's all!"

pluto froze for a moment, hooked his left thumb into his jeans pocket and assumed a pose.

"Yeah. Yeah, sure, Luke. What-the-fuck-ever."

Luke had to assert himself, he knew. He couldn't appear weak now, even if it meant taking a bullet to the brain. Die with some dignity, at least, he told himself.

pluto checked his watch, moved towards a wide gap in the trees and sage.

"Come here."

Luke hesitated. Was this it? Was this when and where his life would end? The foliage hung low over his head and kept him in shade. He forced himself closer to pluto and saw the wide curve of the 405 about a half-mile away and below. A heavy stream of cars, trucks and busses plied the wide freeway in both directions and the traffic roar reverberated through the canyon like a churning river.

"Nice spot, eh?" pluto said with subtle pride. "I scouted it weeks ago but got spooked by a couple hikers during my, uh, set-up. Check out the Getty over there."

Luke scanned the area, saw a small portion of the sprawling Getty Art Center a half-mile to the south.

"So what the fuck are we doing here, pluto?"

Luke surprised himself with the loud tenor in his voice and the feeling of defiance he'd mustered in the last five minutes.

pluto's face stretched into a lopsided grin as he pointed to a pile of leaves at his feet.

"Lemme tell you something, Mandrake. When I started reading your Gutter posts last year in the 'Stan, I said to myself, this is me. This is fuckin' me I'm readin' about! I mean, you nailed it...and I could totally relate. And I said, this fucker's cool...he writes how I feel, and what I think, and if I ever get outta this ass-crack of a country I am gonna look him up. So I guess this is what it's kind'a all about."

"You...you read my Gutter blog?"

"Yeah, in fuckin' rehab. Yours and a hundred others, including some quality porn sites...because that's all I could do in my spare time...sit at a fuckin' laptop and smell the stench of my oozing wounds. I even sent you a couple e-mails...but you never hit me back."

"No shit. Well, I apologize for that."

"Yeah, sure. You're gonna do more than apologize...now."

The anxiety returned, more intense than ever, and Luke began to tremble.

"Just tell me, pluto. You gonna off me here...now? I need to know..."

"C'mon, bro, lighten up. I could've off'd you days ago. I was parked outside your house for an hour. I saw you walk to the store and answer my call. I could'a popped you right then and there. No, you play the game and there might be a way out of this. You just gotta follow the rules and dig. Right here...."

Luke studied him, glanced down at the mound.

"Dig. Dig with what?"

"Your hands...get 'em dirty for me."

Luke hesitated, worked to process what pluto had just related to him, and after a few seconds knelt down and began to grab handfuls of mulch. Shit, he thought, maybe he's about to uncover Shana's maimed and mangled body, providing pluto with some perverse amusement as Luke reacted with an appropriate scream.

No. In less than a minute his fingers scraped across hard canvas and with a few quick wipes he uncovered the green camo duffel.

"Pick it up," pluto directed.

Luke lifted the bag from its shallow grave, appreciated its heft, probably close to thirty pounds, and quickly surmised what was inside.

"Handle with TLC, dude," pluto chirped again. "That's my pride-an-joy you're holdin'. Go on, open it."

Luke found the zipper on the narrow canvas and pulled. In seconds he was looking at a gun, also with a green camo paint scheme, fitted with a long black telescopic sight.

"It's a Robar RC-50F, dude," pluto beamed. The kind of smile that comes from a dad staring down at his newborn son wrapped in swaddling cloth. "Best fuckin' name-taker ever made...like the platinum version of an M82. Bought it online a week before my discharge."

Another helicopter whirred overhead, this one closer than the last, and disappeared over the ridgeline to the west.

"So, what, you need an audience now for your next kill?"

A sudden revulsion charged him and Luke had the urge to toss the gun in pluto's face. He could do it, just knock him down and take off into the foliage and run down the hillside. But all that would do is kill Shana and Daryl, ultimately.

"Take it out and hold it, Luke."

It wasn't so much a command as an exhortation, a granting of permission to caress the thing that had wrought so much savage destruction in the past several months.

Luke pushed the bag off the barrel and cupped his hands around the stock. Wow. He couldn't deny the surge of exhilaration, that same adolescent excitement he felt when he first hefted the Remington .22 his father had given him on his 14th birthday.

"Pretty fuckin' awesome, isn't it? That's a Nightforce scope, NXS 56 millimeter. That tour bus last week...I nailed it from just over fourteen hundred yards. Moving target, man...one ass-kickin' kill-shot!"

"Yeah, pluto...I get it. You're good."

"Okay, well, I'm tellin' you again. Careful dude...it's loaded."

Luke fixed his eyes on pluto's face made even more grotesque by the wavering tree shadows crisscrossing his scars. "This. Is loaded. With bullets."

"No, with dog shit. Of course with bullets, numb-nuts! Fifty cal, jack'd for max penetration. For _your_ first kill."

The fist on his throat again. "My _what_?"

## ***

# Chapter 46

"You need to know it, Luke-mon. You need to feel it. The rush. The vibe. The high that comes...."

"NO...NO FUCKING WAY!" Luke didn't recognize his own voice, the pressure on his esophagus acting like a valve on a trumpet.

pluto stepped back and in one deft motion withdrew the black semi-automatic from his pants pocket.

"Oh yes fucking way. You're gonna prop yourself on that stump there and sight it up. When a bus turns that corner to the left, like that one right there..."

Luke saw a large white charter bus ease around the southbound bend on the freeway and approach at a close oblique angle among a phalanx of other vehicles.

"...you're gonna take out the driver and see, see what a single bullet...three or four for you, prob'ly...can do to relieve the problem. Because that's the beauty of it. When you do what I do for a living, you see it...you absorb it. Not just some fleeting glimpse, but the whole fuckin' payoff...the head poppin', the chest caving from the sudden 'evacuation' of major organs. That's what they called it in training...the _evacuation_ of your target's internal organs...all through that little round hole that might as well be the eye of God."

pluto's voice turned softer, almost melodious, and his eyes glistened. Luke dropped to a knee and stared at the rifle as pluto continued what now became a poignant sermon on the nature of his discontent, pacing back and forth and waving the pistol for emphasis.

"Because here's what it is, Mandrake. This whole gun-crazy, gun-rights, gun-control bullshit misses the whole fuckin' point. All those faggot liberals and gun-control wusses who want to ban machine guns and thirty-round clips and do background checks on every jagoff who wants a gun, they don't fuckin' get it. And really, neither do all the redneck assholes who own the guns and would rather kill their mothers than part with their beloved rifles. IT'S NOT ABOUT THE FUCKING GUNS! It's about the mentality. It's about the mindset. It's about Americans, and who we are in the world, dude. From Jamestown to this moment, Luke-mon...this country owes its life to killing. I mean, what we did to the red man...and the redcoats...and the spics, coons, krauts and japs, and the slopes and the gooks and the towelheads. Shit, what we did to ourselves! The fuckin' Civil War, man! Seven-hundred thousand Americans killed by other Americans! I mean, think about what you played as a kid, right? Cops an' robbers, cowboys and Indians, army man and space man and all that shit...always with a gun, right? And the vid-games today! Dude, we fuckin' used 'Call of Duty' in our Corps training. Some colonel had the bright idea to test our reaction times with fucking 'Call of Duty Black Ops' on his kids' PlayStation. That is no fucking bullshit!"

Luke studied him as spittle foamed at the corners of pluto's reconstructed mouth. "So that's what this is now. I'm here to...to satisfy your perverse idea..."

"You're goddamned right it's perverse. The whole fuckin' country's perverse! We are the killing nation. We are the folks who will shoot-to-kill the rest of the world in the big global meltdown called The Apocalypse. Just like we've been doing, only times a billion. And what I'm doing now...what you're about to do...it's all just part of the flow...part of the _mandala,_ man! And it's building. And it'll build even more when you do what you have to do. So get your ass over there and set yourself up."

Luke heard it then, a third helicopter, only this one wasn't just flying overhead but seemed to be circling, wide. He didn't look up but instead took the rifle over to a jagged stump.

"I've never killed anyone, pluto. I shot some birds as a kid with my twenty-two, killed a couple squirrels that I cried over later. I'm not a hunter...I'm not a killer."

"Yeah, but you eat meat, right? You love a thick, juicy T-bone, am I right?"

"Sure...sure, I eat meat. But that doesn't...."

"You know how many cows we kill in the United States, Mandrake...just to feed our fat fuckin' faces?"

"I'm guessing a few million...every year."

"A few? Try about fifty mill, every fucking year. And a couple hundred million pigs. Killed. Slaughtered. Not to mention all the gristle we import from Argentina and Mexico and God-knows-where."

"So tell me you're a vegetarian, pluto. That would make my day."

"No, not quite. I eat fish...and a little poultry. But when I was laid up for months.... Yeah, I 'preciate the fact you haven't asked me how I got my Jason mask, but you don't have to be fuckin' Einstein to see I got broiled. Chopper crash in Korengal. Fuckin' Chinook, man...RPG took the rear rotor clean off as we were coming' in. The only survivor...and for months I wished I wadn't. Over twenty surgeries...and they wanted to do more. After a while, the pain...pain becomes your _raison d'etre_ , know what I mean? Or should I say, 'pain management.' So that when you don't have it...when you're 'pain free,' as they say, you feel blessed...truly blessed. Anyhow, in the ward, I couldn't chew for weeks so they gave me fish, all poached and soft and tasteless. I just inhaled that shit off a spoon and that's how come...I mean, that's just one of the reasons...."

It wasn't just one helicopter now but two and Luke could see the dim outline of a fuselage through the foliage as the aircraft hovered near a hilltop a mile or so away. pluto heard them, too.

"Shit, man...time's a-wastin'. Assume the position!"

He backed off a few feet and held the pistol up, aiming it loosely at Luke's head.

"Put the gun in the groove and take the lens caps off the scope...carefully."

Luke set the gun between two dull shards of wood protruding up from the eucalyptus stump and uncovered the scope sight. He hadn't shot a rifle in decades but he supposed it was much like riding a bike, or throwing a baseball, or fucking. He placed the butt of the fiberglass stock against his right shoulder and gripped the forestock.

"Chamber a round first, dip-shit!"

Luke could hear it, the tension in pluto's voice, something akin to fear that notched his commands an octave higher.

He grabbed the bolt, pushed it up, pulled it back, and saw the huge brass cartridge pop into the magazine.

"Now shove it in there!"

Luke pushed the bolt forward and absorbed the hard metallic clicking sounds of a tightly machined weapon responding to the action. His heart pounded, not only from pluto's commands but from the heft, the contours of the rifle. And the smell. The aroma of sweet gun oil tickled his senses and the feel of the heavy gun in his hands gave him an odd sense of potency. Jeezuz, was he actually getting a semi in his shorts?

"You feel it, don't you, Mandrake. You know what the fuck I'm talkin' about, what I've been talking about this whole time."

Luke leaned forward, peered through the narrow aperture of the scope, saw the vehicles and human faces speeding towards him masked by the calibrated crosshairs as if they were just a few feet away.

"Flick that lever near the bolt...there you go."

He was now fully armed, primed, and it was no longer about saving Shana and Daryl's respective lives, or even his own. It was about accessing a part of himself that pulsed with blood, reacting to the secretions of an organ for which there was no name, no Latinate designation, no earthly word. Not an organ so much as an essence, an impulse, an hereditary linkage to the first human act of violence against a fellow human being, that primordial urge that connected him to the fossilized bones of his simian ancestors across eons of violent history.

He braced himself against the stump, adjusted his arms slightly, made himself more comfortable.

"Nice form...excellent form!" pluto yelped, moving up close behind him. "Just know that that butt's gonna kick like a motherfucker so jam it in there tight...real tight!"

Luke blinked, mashed his left eyelid shut, adjusted his right eye to the scope, curled his right index finger around the trigger and saw a long red Metro bus appear from around the bend with a couple semi-tractor-trailer rigs behind it.

The driver was a woman, a face like Oprah's with short shiny jerry curls and wearing an orange safety vest.

"Dude, there it is. Put that driver on the crosshairs. Scope's been calibrated so just take it...take the shot. Easy on the trigger. Squeeze it, man...just squeeze it...."

Luke swallowed, put pressure on the trigger.

pluto cackled. "You feel it, Mandrake? You feel the connection? Fuckin' divine, man!"

Luke exhaled, saw the bus driver's jowly face clearly beneath the intersecting lines.

Clarity.

Then, a loud _thud_ and a spray of warm tissue.

pluto's body toppled hard into Luke's back and he pulled the trigger.

A half-second later his right shoulder exploded in blood and pain and he spun around, the rifle flying from his grasp.

Luke grabbed the massive wound with his left hand, blood spurting from torn veins and arteries.

"DON'T SHOOT, DON'T SHOOT, DON'T SHOOT!..."

He couldn't stop shouting even as he fixated on pluto laying close beside him, the gaping center-mass wound exposing a heart still quivering.

Three, five, seven men in dark camo outfits emerged from the underbrush, yelling for Luke to freeze, to stay still and keep his hands visible, all aiming guns at him.

In seconds the world turned opaque, fading quickly, and Luke stared into a fuzzy crimson purgatory of demons, serpents and at the very center, his mother in a white frock, beckoning to him.

## ***

# Chapter 47

Lucas A. Mandrake had finally found the notoriety and global recognition he had sought for so long as a struggling actor in Los Angeles.

But he was not a happy man. Not at all.

First, there was the pain. Constant, throbbing, debilitating. The FBI marksman's .223 bullet had penetrated his back approximately six centimeters to the right of his spinal column, shattered his right clavicle, nicked the superior lobe of the right lung and obliterated the costal cartilage connecting rib no. 2 to the sternum. After nearly seven hours in surgery at UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center he'd spent five days on a Demerol drip and was put on heavy doses of Cefazolin to fight a nasty infection.

Then came the interrogations. During his recovery in hospital, Luke was interviewed nearly a dozen times by members of the Southland Sniper Task Force, but most often by Special Agent Winkle, who was not at all pleased over Luke's voluntary and involuntary cooperation with pluto's lethal antics.

Here is a partial transcript of their longest and most contentious interview, conducted six days after Luke's surgery and recorded by a slim paralegal named Annette from the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, which ended when Luke experienced a severe anxiety attack and was wheeled back into ICU for the evening:

WINKLE: "You put alotta people at risk, Mandrake, and may be indirectly responsible for some casualties... "

LUKE: "That's bullshit! I don't buy that for a second. It was never my intention..."

WINKLE: "What exactly were your intentions with Nugent?"

LUKE: "I never had 'intentions' with him. He's the one who contacted me, initially.'

WINKLE: "Yeah, but you stayed in contact with him for nearly a month. That raises some serious, serious questions."

LUKE: "Okay, and for most of that time I didn't really believe he was the sniper until...until the bus shooting...with the Chinese..."

WINKLE: "Really? Really, Mandrake? We took a look at your hard drive, scanned every piece of correspondence you had with that nutbag, and it seems to me you liked the creep...that you could actually relate to him on some fucked-up psychotic level."

LUKE: "Hey, I wrote you the goddamned letter, aw-right? I put my life in jeopardy...and the lives of my...of my family."

WINKLE: "Yeah, and you know what I call that? I call that cheap thrills. I call that a stunt. You had to know who and what you were dealing with..."

LUKE: "Yes, a deranged killer...just like I told you in the let...OUW! Every time I move I get this sharp, sharp pain..."

WINKLE: "Mmm, yeah, bullet wounds suck. Here's the deal, Mandrake: the consensus among us good guys is that you motivated Nugent to shoot at that tour bus...that you were complicit in that attack, and that you prolonged..."

LUKE: "Hey, HEY! No way! No fucking way! How was I supposed to know..."

WINKLE: "It's like getting a parking ticket, Mandrake. You get a ticket, you go see the judge and you tell him, hey judge, I didn't see the no-parking sign. Well you didn't see it because you didn't look for it. You knew there might be a no-parking sign, but you figured, hey it serves my purpose to go on my merry fucking way and not look for it. Understand? You didn't look for the sign, Mandrake. And that's why the DA wants you on a platter for the grand jury."

LUKE: "The grand jury."

WINKLE: "Yeah. 'pluto,' as you call him...he got his. Got exactly what the good Lord intended for him to get. But you...Slocum thinks you deserve some time."

LUKE: "Really? Okay, fine. We're done here. I'm calling a lawyer, and the next time you want to barge in here and...ah, shit! I am in a shitload of pain and I need a nurse. Nurse!"

WINKLE: "See, the problem with guys like you, Mandrake...guys who spout their self-absorbed blah blah on the internet with their lame-ass blogs and tweets and YouTube vids...it's just alotta plop-plop, fizz-fizz...and I don't mean Alka-Seltzer. You're like the two-year-old who wants mommy to watch him shit into a bowl. That's all it is. In my mind, that's all it's good for, all that social media crap...a bunch'a children shitting into bowls so momma can say how good they are."

LUKE: "You know what, Agent Winkle. Go...go...aah, shit. Nurse...NURSE!"

End of interview.

## ***

# Chapter 48

Web sites and newspapers carried headlines for days about Luke's connection to Zack Nugent, along with a few pictures and headshots of Luke that they'd managed to cull from the internet. Most of them cast him in a positive light, as details of the tip-off letter and the subsequent manhunt filtered into the media. But a few of the more sensational headers weren't so flattering:

" _Mandrake Used Southland Sniper for Blatant Self-Promotion, Cops Say"_

—CNN website

" _Blogger May Have Been in Contact with Nugent in Afghanistan Long Before Shooting Rampage Began"_

—New York Post

" _Mandrake Knew Nugent was Sniper for Weeks before Notifying Authorities"_

—Los Angeles Times

Not that Luke was aware of them, but Danny came by his room almost every day after the surgery to summarize the gist of the publicity, good and bad, and to offer some cynical moral support for as long as Luke could stand it.

In one brief encounter, as Luke managed to sit up briefly and take some soup from a waifish Filipino nurse, Danny tried to emphasize the positive side of the situation.

"Dude, listen to me. You're the talk of the Twittersphere right now...a freakin' media sensation."

Luke, still hovering on the fringe of sedation, gave his only real friend a weak thumb's up.

"Great. I guess that means I'm famous, eh?"

"Yeah, dude. They're calling you an anti-war blogger...and a former Hollywood actor."

"An actor...no fucking shit. Sorry nurse."

She forced a polite smile, stopped feeding him and left his tray on the bed as she exited the room.

Danny leaned close. "Dude, she is smokin'! Love that 'Pino poon."

"Yeah," Luke groaned. "Yesterday she washed my dick."

"Sweet. You need anything...want anything?"

"Yeah, Dan-O. Can you find out what's going on with...with Shana? And my cats?"

"She's okay, I know that. They interviewed her on some news show. Very easy on the eyes...like, hypnotic."

"Yes," Luke said meekly. "Yes she is."

"I'll try to get the skinny on the kitties for you."

"Great. Now excuse me while I go unconscious again."

Several major news agencies attempted to contact him for interviews but Luke was in no condition to evaluate, analyze, rationalize and ultimately excuse his behavior before a global audience. At least not yet. So Danny became his informal agent and buffer as he continued to recover, although one young producer from Fox News actually found her way into Luke's hospital room one afternoon and offered him $100,000 and a discreet blow job to go on camera and discuss his relationship with the Southland Sniper.

Luke declined both temptations.

After nearly a week in hospital Luke called Colin and discovered that the man who'd helped him stay sober for nine years was not nearly as compassionate when it came to someone he perceived as a possible accomplice to sniper mayhem.

"Quite honestly Lucas, the fact that you never really discussed this with me, your connection to this Nugent character...it raises some serious questions in my mind about your overall commitment to me, to the program...and to a wholesome sober lifestyle," he told him over the phone. "I don't think I can, in good conscience, continue as your sponsor."

"Not sure how to respond to that, Colin," Luke told him dryly, and still in some significant pain, "but if that's how you feel, I can't argue with you. Let me just say, uh, happy eye-fucking at those Westside meetings."

"And just what is _that_ supposed to mean?"

Luke disconnected and tossed his phone aside.

## ***

# Chapter 49

The day before Luke was scheduled to be discharged, Daryl came by his room for a brief but assertive chat, just as fashionably tanned Doctor Ostenburg was explaining to Luke the dosage regimen for the oxycodone he was prescribing. Daryl paced outside the door and when the doctor left he slid in and went straight to the slatted window which offered an open view of some pricey Bel Air homes on lush green hills to the north.

"Hey, Luke-mon, long time no chat."

Luke had been experiencing some minor withdrawal discomfort from the Demerol and his right shoulder throbbed continuously. Still, he reacted with overt relief at the sight of his stepson alive and in apparently healthy condition in baggy black cargos and a zippered blue hoodie.

They'd spoken by phone a couple days earlier but the conversation had been brief, with Luke imploring Daryl to feed and water the cats, to which his stepson had responded with a mere grunt.

"Hey, Daryl, really good to see you."

"Yeah," Daryl answered. "Yeah...whatever."

He shoved his hands deep into his sweatshirt pockets and made minimal effort to conceal his harsh ambivalence.

"How...how are you and...and Shana doing?"

"How are we doing...yeah. Good question. Doing pretty good, in fact. They're calling us 'T-S-2' on Twitter... 'The Sniper Two.' Next week we're doing G-M-A and some interview thang on Fox. Looks like you're doing OK, especially with the primo meds they're giving you here."

"I'm actually not so good, if you wanna know the truth. The pain is...it's really bringin' me down."

"Mmm, yeah. Bringin' you down, huh? Let me tell you about pain, Luke-mon...."

"Daryl, please. No 'Luke-mon.' Please..."

"Okay, whatever. But I need to tell you about my pain...our pain...tied up in that trailer for almost three fucking days."

Luke finally put his full attention on Daryl's skinny frame as his stepson began to pace mildly from the window to the bed.

"I heard it was only about thirty-six hours," Luke interjected.

"Bullshit! I'm talking about the entire fucking ordeal, aw-right? No food, no water, no bathroom," he continued. "My girlfriend and me, tied together, pissing and shitting our pants, side-by-side, for what seemed like forever!"

A pudgy nurse shambled by the door and reacted to Daryl's volume.

"Everything okay in here?"

"Yes," Luke said with a fast smile, "yes, fine. Can you close the door, please?"

The nurse hesitated, obliged.

"Yeah, I heard that you spent a couple nights in a Santa Monica hospital. I wanted to call you, but I was in no condition...."

"We nearly died! Yeah, I'm okay now, I'm fully rehydrated, and we've been pounding the P-J's pie like you wouldn't believe. We got some potential book deals and even an HBO movie gig thrown our way, so yeah, I'm okay. But a week ago I was almost dead! It was like an oven in that shithole. That asshole gagged us so we could barely breathe and when I finally got the gag off I had to scream for hours to get some asshole neighbor's attention. Shana went into some kind of coma for a day. They said another two hours and she'd'a been toast!"

"You don't have to shout."

"Fuck you, Luke!"

Daryl wiped his nose and his eyes with his sleeve and turned away.

"Daryl, what the hell can I say? It was never my intention...I never wanted anyone to suffer...to get hurt..."

Daryl pirouetted and took a couple steps towards him.

"We're getting married."

Luke said nothing.

"She told me...told me everything. After we got the gags off, that's how we entertained ourselves...telling each other all the fucked-up shit we'd done in our lives. Things like leaving dog crap on a neighbor's porch, burning down a garage during a pot party...and sleeping with our boyfriend's stepdad. I knew she was bangin' somebody else, I just didn't know.... That's why I drove down to Venice to meet her. Oh...sorry about your truck, by the way."

"Why, what happened to my truck?"

"Hit a post, in the parking lot. I got distracted. Pretty gnarly dent in the door."

Luke rolled his eyes, shrugged. "No worries." He really couldn't find a way to convey the cluster of shame, embarrassment, and humiliation spinning through his head and making his shoulder hurt that much more.

"I mean, how sick is that? How fucking perverted is that? Coming on to your step-son's girlfriend...seducing her...deceiving her?"

"Daryl, I didn't...." But Luke caught himself. What was the point, trying to defend his actions now? Why bother to correct the record with some lame argument about how the whole thing was totally mutual, and that in fact a case could be made that _she_ seduced _him_?

"You're right," he said after a lull. "I have no excuses. None. You're totally entitled to...to hate me...despise me..."

"You're fuckin'-ay right I'm entitled...asshole."

Daryl went back to the window and after another minute Luke resolved to ask him the most important question, something that he'd been obsessing over since he emerged from his anesthetic daze three days earlier.

"Daryl, can you tell me, please...how're my cats doing?"

Daryl laughed, a hacking spurt of cathartic spittle spraying the window, and he wiped his mouth with his sleeve again.

"They're dead. Both of them."

Luke let out a guttural sigh and his chest heaved.

"What?"

Daryl laughed again and faced him.

"Fuck your goddamn cats. They're not dead."

Luke closed his eyes and wiped them with his left hand.

"Dude, I thought about it. Just grabbing that hammer in the kitchen drawer and BAM! You know, while they're eating. Just a couple quick whacks..."

"But...but you didn't..."

"They were in pretty sad shape when we got home, but Shana...she's been taking care of them. She's not who you think she is, dude. She's not some gang-bangin' coed slut I managed to hook up with. She's deeper than you'll ever know."

"I'm sure she is, Daryl. We...we were in a bad place, both of us..."

"No! Lemme tell you about bad places, Luke. A fuckin' toy hauler parked in a junk yard in Lake Los Angeles. You know Lake Los Angeles? First, there's no fuckin' lake. Just dirt. And rocks. Big brown ugly rocks. And heat. That was the view from the window...once we got the blindfolds off. A pile of big brown rocks. But something happened in that trailer...something cosmic. God touched us, man...and we're gonna spend the rest of our lives together and stay in touch with Him...while we spend all the cash the world wants to throw at us because we're such cute and accessible victims."

Luke stayed quiet for a few long seconds and let his stepson collect himself. It wouldn't be long before that bond would no longer be valid, legally, because in truth it had never been valid emotionally.

"I'm happy for you both," Luke said finally.

"Yeah. Righteous. When you get home we got a bunch'a legal stuff to talk about. Those cops say you're in deep shit and...and I want the house."

"Sure, Daryl. Sure thing. We'll work it out. We'll work everything out."

Daryl stared at him for a few seconds, smirked, shook his head and left.

## ***

# Chapter 50

When Danny drove Luke home the following day they said little until they turned onto Finch Street and saw the horde of reporters and camera crews encamped around the house.

"Shit, there they are," Danny said flatly.

"Yeah. Okay...keep driving."

Daryl had called him the night before, told him to be prepared for the media blitz, but Luke was still surprised at the sheer number of people milling around a half-dozen news vans jamming the street, trampling the lawns of the surrounding houses, and pressing against the barricades erected by traffic police.

As Danny's SUV crept toward the swarm Luke hunkered down in the seat.

"Pull as far into the driveway as you can, Dan-O..."

"Roger that."

Luke lowered his head as the shouts began:

"That's him, that's him!"

"There's the creep now!"

"Hey, the asshole's coming home!"

Danny eased towards the driveway as Luke heard the questions and withstood the tapping, pounding, slapping on the windows:

" _Tell us how you feel, Mandrake!"_

" _How long did you really know Zack Nugent?"_

" _Did you help him find targets?"_

" _Who gave him the name 'pluto'"?_

" _Did he really force you to shoot at that bus, or was that your idea?"_

" _How do you feel about doing jail-time, Mandrake?"_

" _Who's your lawyer?"_

" _Are you gay?"_

Danny turned sharply and gunned the engine, braking hard at the white wooden gate, and that's when Daryl loped out of the house, opened it and allowed Danny to drive deep into the property and park in front of the guest house.

Luke threw his door open and despite the stabs of pain from his bandaged shoulder ran to the back porch.

"I'm gonna take off, Luke!" Danny yelled at him. "This is too crazy for me!"

"Too crazy for me, too!" Luke hollered back.

Luke found his cats curled on the sofa in the study. When he entered the room they looked at him impassively. Exene began to purr and Zoomer mewed.

"Hey guys...nice to see you...alive and well."

He wanted to pet them but couldn't ignore the noise coming from the front of the house. He left the door open and went to the front window where he could see the phalanx of reporters pushing against a low, make-shift mesh-net fence that Daryl had erected. The curtains were drawn but he watched them through the thin muslin, cackling among themselves, the media zombies hungry to devour him while a couple LAPD patrol cops kept them off the front porch.

"They've been here all day. That's the third time I've had to call the cops."

Daryl's voice startled him from behind. Luke glanced at him.

"Yeah. Fucking piranhas."

"Maybe you should make some kind of statement or something."

"Later. I'm tired. I'm going upstairs."

"Uh, Luke..."

Luke faced his stepson who appeared heavier, healthier.

"Yeah."

"I moved all your shit into Britney's room. Shana and I...we took over the master bedroom. Hope you don't mind."

"Is she here?" The question caught in his throat, came out raspy.

Daryl inflated himself slightly. "No, dude, she's not here. She's with her mom."

"Okay."

Luke went upstairs, turned left and padded into the smaller room, his clothes heaped on the bed, his dresser items stacked semi-neatly on the floor. From the window he could look out on the front lawn and see the 30 or 40 media dweebs collecting into their cliques, chatting among themselves, a few climbing into vans and driving off. One of them pointed to the window and said something like "I think that's him!"

Luke backed away, cleared a spot on the bed.

He found the pill bottle in his jacket pocket, went into the small bathroom and turned on the tap.

It was still too early for his next dose but fuck it, he thought. Fuck it all. Maybe take four instead of two. No. That would make him sick. Just enough to relax and get comfortable. Sleep for a while. Try and forget the quagmire he was flailing in.

He took the pills, pulled off the jacket with effort, kicked away his shoes and lay down.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven....

The quote just came to him and he laughed a little. Two months earlier he was a king of the world, in his mind. Now? A fringe media creep on the verge of murder and conspiracy charges, having to hide in his own home for days, perhaps weeks to avoid further public humiliation.

"The mind is its own place...."

Something landed on his gut and he sat up.

Exene, the 17-year-old black Persian who rarely climbed the stairs.

Luke stroked her lumpy matted fur and she stared at him with her round yellow eyes and those thin black pupils, narrow slits through which to mock and forgive him in her special feline way.

That was it, Luke thought. For the rest of my life, people will see me through narrow black slits.

He managed to sleep for a while and when he woke up with Exene curled on his stomach, he actually felt much better.

## ***

# Chapter 51

It took an FBI forensics team nearly five hours to find the bullet that had smashed through the air conditioning unit on the trailer of the big rig immediately behind the articulated red Metro bus. And in fact, that was exactly where Luke was aiming, having set the crosshairs on the truck a second or so before the SWAT guerillas swarmed over the clearing in the woods and shot him and pluto.

Bottom line—no one got hurt from Luke's sniper attack.

Which meant that Solomon Tropp, a diminutive man with a large head, a noble shock of kinky gray hair and impeccable Armani suits, the renowned defense lawyer recommended to him by Peggi's brother, of all people, could argue for significantly reduced charges should the District Attorney decide to prosecute.

Luke attended a couple meetings with Daryl's lawyer, Kevin Firth, a friend of the father, to hash out the devolvement of Peggi's estate, with Luke now willing to void his name on the house title and accept what was essentially a buyout from the Geist clan: $10,000 and a signed promise to totally vacate the premises—and their lives—within three months.

He spoke with Brenda briefly by telephone who told him rather bluntly that his job no longer existed; that due to budget constraints and a complete staff reorganization he was being laid off despite having seniority over 80 percent of the other employees.

"That's fine, Brenda," he told her. "I'm cool with that. Best of luck to you...."

A movie producer named Larry Michaels called and offered Luke $25,000 for the rights to his story. Luke told him to go fuck himself.

Three separate publishers extended potentially lucrative book offers that could net him close to a million dollars. Luke said he'd have to discuss them with his agent—as soon as he found a suitable agent.

The half-million-dollar reward payout offered by the City of Los Angeles might also be Luke's for the taking if he chose to pursue it, but Detective Holsinger made it plain in a brief e-mail that it would take a lawsuit and perhaps years in the courts to settle. Luke sent a plain and brief e-mail back to Holsinger: "Please shove that reward bundle up your ass, detective. Have a good one!"

One muggy morning in late July, nearly a month after his discharge from the hospital, Solomon Tropp called Luke on his new Samsung smart phone and told him he could relax: Andrew Slocum, the Los Angeles District Attorney, would not be filing charges after all, and Luke could pay Tropp's $30,000 bill in six easy installments.

## ***

# Chapter 52

"Luke? Hey. How's it going?"

Shana, standing at the rear French doors in a blue Juicy Couture sweat suit as Luke did his physical therapy.

His bandages were off but the pain remained and his young gay therapist had given him a few mild stretching exercises to loosen the still-forming scar tissue. He was moaning, grimacing, yelping and cursing to himself when her voice startled him. He turned and crossed his arms in front of him.

"Shana...hey."

They'd barely said words to each other in the weeks after his return, Luke staying in his room or his study going over contracts and writing letters of apology to the families of every one of pluto's victims, eating irregularly, sleeping fitfully, while Shana spent weekdays at her mother's apartment in Montebello and booked interviews. When she was in the house Daryl made it clear he wanted no contact between them, but this day Daryl was with his father on some kind of outing, a fishing trip to Santa Catalina Island.

"I...I heard you out here. You doing okay?"

Luke felt strange, awkward, rigid. "Well, you know, 'okay' is one of those words that covers a lot of space. Sure, I'm okay, as far as it goes."

"I'm glad...really."

She was holding a cup of something and he finally went to the porch swing where he sat.

"How've you been doing?" Luke asked her.

"Mmm, you know. Okay. Ha, there's that word, right?"

They shared some kind of giggle to cut the tension.

"No, I guess I'm doing really well. We both are...Daryl and me."

"I saw your interview with Pat Lanier on _The Today Show_ ," Luke said thinly. "Very impressive."

"You think so? I was so fu...freakin' nervous."

"You're a natural. I say milk it...milk it for all you can. America loves its heroes."

"I don't think of myself that way...not at all."

"But you are, whether you like it or not."

She didn't say anything but took a few short steps to the edge of the deck.

"Shana, when I was in hospital, recovering...I went over this conversation in my mind a thousand times, what I would say to you when I got the chance..."

"Me too, Lucas. Don't forget that I was in hospital, too, for a couple days. I had to recover...I'm still recovering."

"Yeah. And then Daryl told me what had happened, what really happened, and I felt...I felt...." What? What had he felt, really? Luke couldn't finish the sentence, memories of her naked body arching underneath his manly thrusts making this lame expiation all the more ridiculous.

She stared into the dead rose garden and poured her tea into the dirt. "When we were in that trailer and things looked really bad, I realized how...how out of balance everything was...how unfocused my life was, and how...how it was probably meant to be. That what happened was really an intervention, God's way of saying 'Hey, wake up, girl!'"

She forced a laugh and Luke winced.

"No. Sorry, Shana, but I don't buy into that. What happened was a series of events that amplified each other into a tragic confrontation between rage, ego, fear, and ignorance. Like how most violent confrontations develop. Like how wars start. Like how people get killed. People _did_ get killed. _You almost died._ I was a factor in all that. I was a player in your misery. I'll live with that forever. God? To me, God is unknowable. All I know is this pain in my shoulder and the fact that I'll die someday."

"Mmm...that's a pretty cynical way to look at it."

"Maybe so...but that's how I really feel."

"I don't blame you, Luke," she said after a beat. She turned her body to him, assumed what appeared to be a pose of contrition. "I just want you to know...and I really mean this...I don't have any resentments over what happened. I mean, I know it wasn't your fault. You just did what you thought was right."

"I'll be gone next month," he said, bypassing her forgiveness and eager to end it. "House'll be all yours. And Daryl's. And Britney's."

"I want to do something with this garden," she said wistfully. "Plant some really nice flowers...pansies, maybe. Geraniums. I hate roses...so prickly."

"Yeah...Peggi's legacy." Luke wished he hadn't said that, but what the hell.

"You gonna stay in the area?"

"No." His voice became firm, almost defiant. "I'm leaving L.A. I'll spend some time up north, with my brother in Arcata. He has a house, a few cats. Those two'll fit right in."

He nodded towards Zoomer and Exene who were sitting near the spa and sniffing the air.

"That's good to hear."

She smiled and backpedaled towards the door. "I'm grateful for our time together, Luke. Really I am. And...and whatever happens...I wish you nothing but the best."

"Same to you, Shana...best of luck to you."

As she disappeared into the house he got back to his feet to finish his stretching.

## ***

# Postscript

A couple months later Luke found himself sitting on a rock at a place he called Bobber Point where 35 years earlier, on a September day much like this one, he and his dad had shot their guns together, his Remington .22 rifle and the loud Smith & Wesson .38 "Police Special" his father had won in an Army poker game.

Chuck would bring the family there to Big Lagoon on Sundays, a poor man's seaside paradise 25 miles north of Eureka where Luke would build rafts with his brother in summer, fish for steelhead in winter, and sometimes, when his lanky dad was feeling macho and could afford to buy ammunition, they'd bring the guns and shoot.

They didn't wear any ear gear and the explosive reports pounded their eardrums and caused a severe ringing that lasted hours. But Luke craved those moments when he could blast away at driftwood, his dad's empty beer cans, and on one sunny afternoon, a bobber.

They'd cast their lines out that afternoon, fish weren't biting so much, and had loaded their weapons.

"Always point at the ground when you're loading, son," Chuck would say, that plaid newsboy cap pushed forward over his high forehead. "And never, ever point that barrel at any human being. Never!"

Luke was good about that, never pointing his gun at anyone, and he remembers how he bolted a shell into the chamber, brought the rifle up, took careful aim at the red and white bobber on his lifeless fishing line fifty feet away and squeezed the trigger.

POW! More of a pop than a bang with the small-caliber gun.

The bobber disappeared with a splash.

"Outstanding shot, my boy!"

Then it was Chuck's turn, and Luke could see him again, his discontented school-teacher dad on the low flat rock that jutted into the placid water, how he brought the pistol up with deliberate fanfare, pointed it at the nose of a log jutting from the surface, eased the heavy hammer back with his right thumb, and BANG!

The bobber reappeared on the surface, and father and son were puzzled.

"Dad, check it out...is that your bobber or..."

"Son...I think you've got a fish on the line!"

He was right. The bullet Luke had fired had terrified a fish into pulling the bobber down deep, and the report from the loud .38 had driven it back to the surface.

Luke set the gun down, grabbed his fishing pole and for the next ten minutes worked to reel in a flat, four-pound brackish gray flounder, one of his biggest catches ever from that spot, and that's when the place got its name, Bobber Point.

But he couldn't think about Chuck anymore without recollecting those final moments, the last time he saw his father alive, a year before he met Peggi, when cancer and morphine and self-imposed starvation had rendered him virtually helpless in the king-sized bed in his room, and how the man could barely keep his head up, so weak and emaciated. Occasionally he would lift that sunken, eroded face, a face that had been so dashing and winsome once, scan around the room to orient himself, then land on Luke's wet, bloodshot eyes.

"What time is it?" he would ask.

And Luke would tell him, give him the time.

"Dad...are you scared now? Are you afraid?"

Chuck struggled to focus and after a beat mumbled in a quavering voice, "No...no, son. No. I just wish...I just wish...."

"What, dad? What do you wish?"

"Did I tell you...did I ever tell you.... What time is it?"

"It's just after four, dad."

"Before you were born, I was in the Army."

"Yeah dad, I know."

"And...and they were gonna send me over there, you know. Viet Nam."

"Really..."

"You said it was just after four o'clock...in the afternoon?"

"Yes dad, just after four. In the afternoon."

"And I did something. I thought I was being clever, by doing this thing, and they discharged me...a medical discharge."

"Your back...you said. You said you'd hurt your back, in a training..."

"No! That was it, you see. It wasn't my back. It was something else. Something deliberate. I didn't want to go...to the war. So they gave me a discharge. And I didn't go. And now...the shame. The shame...it haunts me, you see."

"But you told me, you've always said it was wrong, what we did over there...."

"Yes. Yes I did. And the louder and more often I said it, the less shame I felt. But I should've gone. That was the thing to do. That was the right thing to do...to go to war...and to fight. What time is it now?"

"Four-seventeen, dad," Luke said, glancing at the bedside clock and wiping his wet face on his sleeve, "in the afternoon."

"Good. Good...very good." And he flashed some kind of a dying man's smile.

Luke walked the five hundred yards or so along the quiet beach, a grove of thick pines and firs to his left, the lagoon spreading wide to his right, and he wiped his eyes quickly with the palms of his hands and climbed into his silver truck with the big dent in the door parked on the gravel road.

In seconds he was turning right, back onto Highway 101 and heading south through hilly stands of majestic green forest.

The radio was on, tuned to KATA, an oldies station he'd enjoyed as a teen, and he sang along to Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man" until the DJ came on and stammered over a news bulletin.

"I, uh...this is really horrible," he said in a warbling voice, and Luke turned up the volume as he drove. "I can't...wow. Here we go again. Unbelievable. I'm looking at the CNN web site and, uh, apparently...some idiot walked into a McDonald's in Sarasota, Florida this afternoon with an assault gun and just started...jeezuz. It says nine people dead, a dozen injured, the shooter dead from a self-inflicted...."

Luke turned it off and drove on, singing "Solitary Man" by heart and reminding himself to open a fresh can of tuna for the cats when he got back to his brother's place.

## *****

## This novel is dedicated to the millions of Americans whose lives have been destroyed by gun violence.

## Follow Marcus A. Hennessy on Twitter at Yossarian17@hennessanity
