by John Whitman
The Harley made enough noise to wake the dead, so Jack didn’t even try stealth. He roared up the S-shaped road to the top of the rise and then idled the engine as he rolled to a stop a few yards from the front door. He climbed off the bike and slid the helmet off his now-sweaty head. He pulled the package out of a pack strapped to the seat and climbed the steps.
He reached the top step to find a shotgun in his face.
3:45 A.M. PST Brentwood
Amy Weiss dreamed that church bells were ringing, which was odd because she was in a grocery store, not a church. The church bells became cash registers that wouldn’t stop ringing up her yogurt, and then telephones ringing at the cashier’s stand, and then she was awake and it was just her telephone ringing shrilly at a ridiculous hour of the morning.
“Uh-huh,” she groaned, having fumbled for the phone.
“Amy, it’s Josh Segal.” She struggled to remember who that was. She dredged up a recollection that Josh Segal was the assistant metro editor, and often got stuck on the night desk. “I need you up and at ’em.”
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“My dad said ‘up and at ’em,’ every morning for twelve years,” Amy said. “Don’t use that phrase, please.”
“Either way, you need to get up. You’re slated to have that interview with the Pope this morning, aren’t you?”
“Interview. Yes. In, oh, five hours or so. Trust me, it doesn’t take that long to do this hair.” She yawned again, wanting to be sleepy, but sleep was fading away. Her reporter’s instincts were tuned in to the excitement in Segal’s voice.
“Drag it out of bed, Weiss,” the assistant editor said. “There’s been some serious stuff you need to be up on when you meet with him.” Amy listened as the editor described, in as much detail as the police would allow, the violence that had taken place at St. Monica’s.
“Jesus, and they’re still holding the conference tomorrow, uh, today?” she said, now fully awake and pulling clothes out of her drawer.
“That’s what they’re telling us. The police haven’t given any motive for the murder of this Father Giggs. They’re not releasing the name of the intruder killed later that evening. We’ve been on the phone with a public relations person for the archdiocese, but we’re getting a hundred variations of ‘no comment.’ ”
“You think the Pope’s going to tell me anything more than what you’re getting from the archdiocese? I’m just doing a puff piece on the conference.”
“You just graduated to the crime beat. I figure our article on the attacks will be a hell of a lot more interesting with a quote from the Pope in it. So get up and—”
“—at ’em. Bite me,” Amy said genially, and hung up.
3:52 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
Jack had spent several minutes facedown in the dirt beside the porch with the shotgun pressed against the back of his neck. He had thought about taking the gun away from the bearded, beer-gutted biker, but this was no time to make trouble. He tolerated the biker’s boot in the small of his back while someone went in to clear things with Dean. Finally, he was let up. Jack looked at the biker, who was grinning out of the hole in his bushy brown-white beard, still lazily holding the shotgun in Jack’s general direction.
“You want to point that thing somewhere else,” Jack said, “before it accidentally gets shoved up your ass.”
“Ha!” the biker said. “You give that a try someday. Come on.”
He led Jack into the house. It stank of beer and farts and mildew that had been around much longer than the bikers. The living room was gloomy, lit by only a seventies-era table lamp and a small fluorescent in the kitchen. There were two couches and a tattered easy chair, the latter occupied by a big man with the kind of huge, uncut arms that indicated genetic size. The man, probably in his late forties or early fifties, still had a barrel chest pushing his T-shirt to the limit. CTU had been able to dig up only one mug
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shot, but that had been enough. Jack recognized Dean Schrock.
“I heard you was a fat guy,” Dean said.
Jack shrugged. “Had to lose my gut. My cousin had a heart attack. My age, too.”
“So, what,” said the biker with the shotgun, “you eat bean sprouts and salads? Shit, we really doin’ business with this dipshit?”
“I’m the dipshit with the shit you need,” Jack said. “Besides, looks like every pound I lost was your gain, so shut the fuck up.”
The biker gave Jack a fuck-off look, but Dean laughed. “Anyway, I made calls when I got here. I knew who to expect.”
Jack shrugged, but inwardly, he knew what Dean meant. The bartender at the Killabrew had been Smithies’s middleman, so having her under the Federal thumb had made impersonating Dog easy, despite the difference in their appearance.
“You heard from Peek?” Dean asked.
“Peek,” Jack knew, was the nickname of the biker the Fresno police had picked up. From what he had confessed, his job had been to ride in early and meet with Farrigian.
“Nah,” Jack said. “He told me to meet up here.”
Dean and the fat biker exchanged glances, and Jack knew that Peek’s absence had put them on edge. “You bring what I need?” Dean asked.
Jack hefted the sack. “You wanted one more brick, I brought it.” “What the fuck?” said a female voice out of the shadows. Jack didn’t know who she was or what she meant,
so he tossed the brick to Dean. A couple of the bikers flinched as the dormant explosive arced across the room, but Dean caught it casually and hefted it.
“What the fuck?” said the woman again, staggering into the lamplight. She was blond, in her late thirties, but with the used look of a much older woman. She blinked at Jack. “You’re not Dog!”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
4:00 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
“Who the fuck are you?” Jack said lazily.
“Deb!” she said indignantly. “I lived down ’round here back in ’94. Or maybe ’95. Something like that.” She blinked several times, and spoke in the overly enunciated speech of someone who is trying not to sound drunk. “I met him coupla times.”
“You mean you screwed him a couple times!” The fat biker laughed. So did everyone else, including Deb, who was clearly no delicate flower.
“You know Deb?” Dean asked. He was laughing, too, but Jack could feel the energy between them change. A wall had gone up between them.
Jack looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t know.
It’s like four o’clock in the morning. At this point I’m too shit-faced to know what they look like. And if I wasn’t shit-faced, I sure as hell wouldn’t choose this one.”
This elicited a roar of laughter from everyone except Deb, who was insistent. “No, no, I’m serious, Dean. I’m sure I met that fat slob before. This ain’t him.”
There were two directions: forward or backward. Jack wasn’t usually one for retreating. He strode forward and plopped himself down on the couch at a ninety-degree angle to Dean, and put his booted feet up on the old scratched coffee table. “Look, I got you the first batch of stuff. Then I hear from Peek that you want more. I brought it. You gonna let this split tail give me a bunch of crap?”
Dean was shrewd. He played the controversy very casually, but Jack, just as shrewd, knew that the biker leader was on his guard. “Nah, she can’t even remember what she looks like half the time,” he said. “Besides, you said you talked to Peek, right?”
Jack leaned back as though he didn’t care much as he corrected: “I didn’t talk to him. He left a message at the Killabrew.” That was how Dog did most of his business. And CTU had checked Smithies’s personal phone records. No calls that day or night from anyone that might have been connected to Peek the biker.
Before Dean could respond, Jack found Deb in his face, her skin leathered yellow, undoubtedly from years of smoking. “You’re way
too good-looking. If I’d screwed you, I’d remember it.”
“If I did you, I’d do my best to forget it,” Jack answered. He put his hand on her face and shoved
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her backward. She fell sprawling on her backside, shrieked, and scrambled to her feet, coming at Jack like a harpy. Before Jack had moved, Dean was on her, catching her wrists in his big hands and shoving her aside.
“Give it a rest, Deb,” he said. “Hell, I did you last year and you hardly remember it.” To Jack, he said, “Thanks for bringing up the extra stuff. You want to help us use it?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah.”
4:09 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
Another door that Harry Driscoll did not want to open. This one, on Shoemacher Avenue, belonged to Father Sam Collins. But just as he had before, Harry knocked.
The door opened after a minute, and Father Collins, his eyes swollen from restless sleep, greeted him.
“Father Collins, Detective Driscoll. I hope I gave you enough time to—”
“Come in, come in, Detective,” Collins said with as much congeniality as four o’clock would allow. “Yes, thanks for calling ahead. I put on some coffee if you want it.”
Harry followed Collins’s words and gestures into the small, well-kept house. There was an intricately carved crucifix hanging in a place of prominence in the entryway, but otherwise the house gave no indication of belonging to a man of the cloth.
“What happened to your arm?” Harry asked immediately.
Collins touched his right hand gingerly to his left arm, which was bound up in a sling. “Oh, it’s been such a pain. Literally!” He laughed. “I was in an accident a while ago. My arm was really badly broken and I had to have surgery. I’m not sure how it’s gone, though. I have a checkup scheduled for next week, but it’s been hurting a lot.”
“What kind of accident?” Harry probed.
“Car accident. Coffee?” Harry accepted, and Collins poured two cups in the open kitchen, then brought them into the living room. “I barely remember it. I didn’t even wake up until after the surgery. I saw the X-rays, though. I have this huge plate in my arm.”
Harry nodded absently. “I’m sorry to have bothered you so early.”
Collins waved him off. Now that he was more awake, his face opened into a smile that Harry guessed was almost permanent. “It’s a wasted night anyway. My arm’s keeping me up, and I have a big conference today, and last night someone broke one of my back windows.”
Biehn, Harry thought. Biehn had said he was trying to break in when someone kidnapped him.
4:12 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
Collins had always been the weak point. The complication. Michael had known it from the begin
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ning. But Yasin had insisted. He had wanted there to be three deliverymen—three, as an ironic joke for Yasin’s own amusement—and Yasin had wanted at least one of them to be ignorant of the package he was carrying. At first, Michael had argued against this last idea, and won. But after that idiot Ali had gotten himself blown up on an airplane, they had to replace him with someone, and Yasin had insisted on returning to his original idea of the unwitting messenger. They had gone to immense amounts of trouble to make that happen, and now, of course, that one unnecessary twist was about to become the snag that might unravel the whole plan.
Michael was parked outside Collins’s house again, just as he had been before, when Detective Biehn arrived. That last encounter had been sheer luck; this was foresight. Michael had bugged Collins’s phone weeks ago, so that he could monitor any calls the priest made to any doctors he might know. That surveillance had paid off when another detective had called, waking Collins and asking him if he could stop by for a few questions. Michael had driven like a bat out of hell through the foggy Los Angeles morning to arrive just behind the detective.
Yasin could go to hell, as far as Michael was concerned. The power Yasin had over them depended entirely on the keeping of a secret, and that secret was unraveling as steadily as their plan. Michael was going to have to eliminate Collins for everyone’s sake, and Yasin could go cry to Allah for all he cared.
4:14 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
“Father Collins,” Harry said, after spending several minutes asking simple questions designed to relax a suspect. “How well did you know Father Giggs?”
Collins sighed. “We were both priests at St. Monica’s, so I knew him pretty well, of course.”
“Were you both part of the youth program?”
Collins shifted ever so slightly. “Me? No, not officially. I helped out when I could. The program was popular, and Father Frank was sometimes overwhelmed.”
“Did you molest the children like he did?”
Silence engulfed the room like a tangible thing, a thick blanket of tension tangling them both. “Exexcuse me?” Collins said at last. He drank his coffee with a trembling hand.
“I said,” Harry repeated, staring directly into the priest’s eyes, “did you molest the children just like Father Frank did?”
Father Collins’s face flushed, then went very, very pale. His eyes could find no place to rest. They flitted like nervous birds from Driscoll to the coffee table, to the window, until finally they fell, exhausted, toward his cup. “I . . . no . . . Oh, Mary, mother of . . .” Something struck him and he looked up finally, his eyes filling with a fearful realization. “Oh my Lord. Is that why Giggs was killed?”
“Answer the question,” Harry demanded. His voice did not contain Biehn’s righteous indignation. It couldn’t, because he could not wrap his brain around the crime he was investigating. He recoiled from it. But his sense of justice would not let it be.
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“I didn’t!” Collins said quietly but urgently. “I mean, I haven’t. Not in years.” He shuddered. “It was such a sin. I should never have; it was Frank; almost always Frank.”
The cup fell from Collins’s hand, staining the couch and the rug with coffee. Collins put his head in his good hand and let out one long, strangled sob, his body convulsing.
4:17 A.M. PST Santa Clarita
One wouldn’t know it from looking at Dean Schrock, but he had a long memory. It stretched farther back than Altamont, farther back than the heyday of the Hell’s Angels. It stretched back to the days when his father lost his farmland in the Owens Valley, way north of Los Angeles. The Owens Valley farmers wanted nothing from Los Angeles. Most of them had never even been there. But Los Angeles wanted something from Owens Valley.
Water.
Eighty years earlier, Los Angeles had all but won the California Water Wars and stolen the water from the Owens River, draining the Owens Lake dry and turning a fertile inland valley into a desert. Farms were ravaged. Spirits crushed. Families torn apart.
The farmers, poor in political power but rich in defiance, had fought back as best they could. Owens Valley in the 1920s witnessed numerous acts of sabotage against the aqueducts built to drain their water for Los Angeles taps. In the late fifties and early sixties, Dean had grown up on the desiccated remains of the family farm, listening to his dad tell stories of his grandfather using a pick to punch holes in the pipes when he couldn’t get his hands on dynamite.
That was when his father wasn’t drunk and miserable, just miserable. Later, when the father drank too much to tolerate, and Dean got too old to take it, he beat up his old man and headed north on a stolen motorbike.
The beating he gave his father never satisfied him. It made him sorry for the old man. Dean always thought that, if he ever decided to raise some real hell, he’d do it to Los Angeles. And he’d do it for Owens Valley.
Which was why Jack found himself riding Smithies’s impounded Harley, hurtling toward Castaic Lake with Dean’s Hell’s Angels all around him. Castaic was a man-made lake, a reservoir that served as the end point of the California Aqueduct. Basically, it was an enormous storage tank for most of the water Los Angelenos drank.
And
Dean was going to blow it up.
“Not just Castaic Dam,” Dean told him when they pulled over to get gas for some of the bikes. “Most of that water comes from Northern California. Stolen, too, I guess. No, my personal target is the pumping station at Sylmar. That’s where the Owens water comes from. But hell, these days the water that ruined Owens is barely a drop down in the city. So I want to hurt them more. I figure I’ll blow up both. That’s why I needed the extra shit.” He hefted the bag Jack had brought to him.
They kicked their bikes into gear and rode north on the steadily rising Interstate 5 for a few miles before arriving at Castaic Lake. Jack had never visited the
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area, so he could do nothing but follow as Dean took an off-ramp that curved away heading toward a vast dark area to the east of the interstate. The road led to small collection of buildings.
There was a gate, and floodlights, but the bikers didn’t seem bothered by them at all. One of the gang hopped off his bike and lifted a pair of bolt cutters off the back, walked boldly up to the gate, and snapped off the thick chain locking the gate closed. The sign on the gate read castaic dam—state water program reservoir—access restricted. The biker pushed open the gate and Dean’s gang rolled in.
Jack felt a fist close hard around his heart as he realized just how easily terrorists could wreak havoc on vital locations inside the United States.
4:32 A.M. PST Shoemacher Avenue, Los Angeles
It might have been the longest fifteen minutes of Harry Driscoll’s life. It was certainly the most horrific. For that time period, he had become Father Collins’s confessor, listening as the priest unburdened himself of many, many years of sins. And those sins were many: lust, gluttony, avarice, selfishness. But all his sins, in whatever form, were always, always visited upon children.
What horrified Driscoll most was the tender terms in which Collins spoke of the kids he had abused and sodomized. They were his lambs, his own flock, his tender charges. When Driscoll mentioned Aaron Biehn’s name, Collins’s face softened and his eyes drifted off nostalgically.