Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  The pregnant teen screamed and spat when Tina raced past her. State Troopers pulled both women back to cover as Fish shouldered through the door after Van Houten and into the shop before Tina could stop him.

  “Fish, wait!”

  It was a typical Hazel Fish concrete cowboy move, and dumb; Fish didn’t know who or what else was inside, or how it laid out, protocol demanded a tactical approach. Besides, they had the gun dealer trapped, surrounded. Contain and control. Yeah, yeah, Fish would later say to Tina, semiapologetic, “and enough firepower in that fucking cinder-block bunker to blow us apart and hold off half a division.”

  Van Houten hustled through the maze of high shelves in his shop and Fish lost track of him. Impetuous but not completely stupid, the DEA agent flopped forward and rolled to the cover of an aisle stacked with survivalist MREs, yelling back, “I’ve lost visual.” Tina came scrambling in the door behind him, staying low. “FBI! We’re FBI! Ellis Van Houten, we have a warrant for your arrest!”

  She didn’t really expect a response. The world went weirdly silent. Outside, Van Houten’s shrill women were reciting all kinds of Old Testament at whoever had the misfortune of handcuffing them. Two Task Force plainclothesmen with shotguns crowded up to either side of the open door, and just as they slipped inside automatic-weapon fire began to shred the room, wild. Shelves of freeze-dried food above Fish were pulverized, a fine aromatic silt of edible nothing swirled in the shop like smoke.

  Fish could see Van Houten’s reflection in a glass display case, he was hunkered in the back room doorway, pale belly flopped over his pants, wedged behind the sales counter and jamming another extended banana magazine into an AR-15 rifle. Fish popped up and laid down a pattern fire, driving the bearish man into the back room for cover.

  “Hazel, we can wait him out,” Tina hissed. But Fish, who she knew would be pretty ticked off now by getting shot at, went forward, he had no other gear, a quick crabwalk on his hands and toes.

  More automatic gunfire ripped the shop apart, Van Houten swinging out into the doorway and unloading half his clip. One of the shotgun cops dropped, just outside, with an astonished intake of air. His partner grabbed him and dragged him away.

  Another burst from the assault rifle. Bullets sawing at the shelf cover behind which Tina had flattened herself, hoping that there was enough mass and matter between her and the shooter.

  She lifted her head and looked for Fish. He was still scrambling forward. Particles glinted and swirled in sunbeams through the barred windows like whirling galaxies of stars. Van Houten put another clip into the AR and tried to locate Fish, but Tina Z. rose and squeezed off careful, measured shots that caused the fat man to flop backward again, and now she was pissed: “Hazel! C’mon. Mellow the fuck out! We don’t have to rush this.”

  “Language? And the hell we don’t. No. We need to get him now. Don’t give him time to think.”

  Tina said, wry, “As if thinking is going to be his strong suit.”

  Fish laughed, letting off tension. With a faint “Fuck you,” Van Houten threw two aimless bursts at them, then kicked the back-room door shut so they couldn’t see him. There was the sound of his boots scuffing on the floor, the sound of cardboard tearing, the ragged wheezing of an overweight weekend warrior in full funk. Tina tried to imagine him, panicked, turning in circles. Security bars over all the windows, cops and Feds waiting outside; there was no way out.

  But a trapped animal is a desperate adversary. And desperate, she knew, is deadly.

  —

  COLTER WAS ON him now, now, predatory, no more pretense of politeness: “You were a bad boy, Mr. Kirby, back in your private practice days.”

  “Those files were sealed.”

  “I don’t know what’s worse. That you settled so cheap, or that you really believe in the concept of sealing.”

  “If you’ve looked at them, it’s actionable prosecutorial misconduct—”

  “—A slam-dunk civil class-action case suddenly, poof, settled, just like that? With attendant murmurings of attorney misbehavior of a, well, sexual nature.” She studied him. Eyes liquid, deep enough to drown in. “Sleeping with opposing counsel? Just guessing.”

  Kirby said nothing.

  “I admit that I’m impressed, though, sort of. Brave man falls on his sword to shield an innocent third party, you lost your wife, you lost your job, and you got exiled to the public sector—”

  “—those files are sealed” was all he could keep saying. And, yes, it scared him that she’d seen them.

  “They were,” she agreed. “And you were thoroughly vetted for this job by the NSA and the FBI, and they’re trustworthy and discreet, right? So what could I possibly be talking about?”

  The threat explicit.

  Colter stood up and came around the table and pulled another chair uncomfortably close to him. Her knees angled over. He smelled a surge of her perfume fueled by the heat of her body.

  “What spawned you?”

  She ignored him, head canted, smiling. Lipstick tinted her teeth. “Two of the senior partners in your old law firm were at Yale with Senator Lindy. They like to talk. Especially they like to talk to pretty girls who work for senators, because it makes them feel potent and young. They invite you to morning prayer group and touch you lightly on the inside of your arm so the backs of their hands might brush the side of your boob, and they think for that moment they are the center of your universe and they tell you all sorts of things that might help you accomplish the tasks their friend the attorney general has given you along with the appointment that has fast-tracked your run to a federal appeals bench. Is it possible I even know the name of the third party you so heroically sacrificed yourself to protect?” She waited. Kirby’s reservoir of easy wit was empty and he had no glib answer for this. “You were a snitch,” she said, then. “That’s why you hate them.”

  There was nothing he could say now to defend what he’d done, except that he didn’t regret it. He hated it, but didn’t regret it. He stayed silent.

  “Would you say women are your weakness?” she asked. Colter was close enough to kiss him.

  Kirby said, “I don’t know, maybe. What’s your analysis?” He thought he knew where the conversation was going.

  “I’ve heard it’s a black thing.”

  Kirby blinked. This was not in his file, or anywhere. How could she know?

  She continued, low, intimate. “You don’t look it. You’re what, one-third? One-quarter? Octoroon? Do you even know? And”—she leaned toward him, distorted by her ambition, grotesque—“is that why . . . I mean, when it comes time to check the box on the forms, wouldn’t it have been to your advantage to check the one that comes with affirmative action? I’m . . . curious.”

  If he hadn’t been so disturbed that she had this most private, intimate detail about him, he would have laughed out loud. Instead, he wanted to be anywhere but in this dull institutional cafeteria with Sabrina Colter. His breath came shallow, he felt the room recede. How did she know? It wasn’t what she was saying, and how wrong she’d gotten it, it was the violation. Nobody knew. Suddenly all he could see was her sharp little teeth and the scarlet lipstick that circled them.

  In a whisper, smiling, “You want to be inside me.” Not a question.

  He did, still, even with everything he now could see about her, distorted, grotesque, it didn’t matter, that much was true. It was his default. He shuddered, ashamed, and looked down at his hands.

  “Is it true, what they say about black men?”

  He found his voice, finally. “You’re . . . unbelievable.”

  “Yeah.” She thought it was a compliment, she was unfazed. “Don’t worry, I’m color-blind. But it’s not going to happen, Gilbert, trust me on this,” she purred. “And trust that I will throw your innocent third party under the bus, unless you get me what I want.”

  Kirby forced hims
elf to look up again, to meet her cold gaze. “And you, you want . . . what?”

  Her voice cut, punched, steely, into him. “Hard justice. True love. To make my mentors proud, to save myself for marriage and those mind-bending orgasms I read about in Fear of Flying. At least a couple of sweet pink babies eventually, after I make judge. A personal relationship with my Savior. And Mr. Nicholas ‘Stix’ Mahrez under our thumb, back in the fold as a reliable and ongoing confidential informant for our office in the active fraud and public corruption investigation of San Diego Mayor Richard Poole.” She took a deep breath and smiled. Her mouth that hellish mire of carnal red and bone white.

  “However you choose to accomplish it,” she said, touching and sending a cold shock through him. She stood, she stretched, she sauntered out, ass rocking, tick tock, tick tock.

  Kirby sat, motionless, for a couple moments, watching the empty space that she’d left in her wake; sat with hands in his pockets, legs actually trembling, then he got up, spun, screamed, and put his fist right through the glass door of the beverage refrigerator, causing the terrified counter guy to scatter his cash like confetti.

  —

  LISTENING TO THE MUFFLED RIPPING of cardboard and scraping footfall coming from the Gun Heaven storeroom where Van Houten had holed up, Tina Z. and Fish reloaded.

  “Maybe he’s making a fort,” Tina quipped.

  Fish made some minor adjustments to his legs and his body, twisting, stretching out, trying to find a more comfortable long-term solution on the floor behind the blown-out displays. “We’re giving him too much time.”

  Tina called out, “Ellis? Buddy, c’mon, be realistic. Even if you make it past us, there’s a whole squad of SWAT guys outside with big guns I don’t even know the name of that they’d gladly put you down with for making them drive all the way from the city, where it’s gloomy but nice and temperate, to sweat this shadeless day out in the hot high goddamn desert.”

  The back room had gone quiet. There was just a flutter of loose shot-up paper on the shelves around them when a breeze came through.

  With a hand signal Tina didn’t understand, Fish hopped over the counter and slammed hard up against a cabinet near the cash register, a dozen feet from the door into the storeroom.

  A SWAT sharpshooter had edged visible in the front door of the shop, with some hellacious variant of an automatic rifle rigged with every add-on his department could afford. Another SWAT cop leaned around the barred front window and smiled faintly at Tina Z., revealing braces. Red beams of their sighting lasers crisscrossed and settled on the storage room door, head high.

  “Ellis?”

  Tina had just begun to move forward in support of Fish when the storage room door yawned open and Van Houten filled it, wearing a Kevlar helmet and full body armor, sales tags dangling like Christmas ornaments on a moving, misshapen tree. Raising a shotgun in his gloved hands, he caused the sharpshooters to open fire, their bullets burrowing harmlessly into his protective gear, staggering him, but not before a flash bloomed from one barrel and Van Houten’s shotgun’s blast hit Tina dead center, lifted her and threw her backward onto the floor, where she puzzled over why she still hadn’t heard its deafening report, and decided she was probably dead.

  9

  TINA Z. WAS DOWN. As still as a drowning pool. Her handgun had spilled away from her, out into the open where there was no way she could retrieve it, even if Fish had believed she was capable of doing so, which, in the mayhem of the moment, he didn’t.

  He was pissed at himself for letting it happen.

  He saw the second muzzle flash of the shotgun shell that chewed apart the side window wood and caused that SWAT sharpshooter to disappear in a blur of debris. The SWAT gunman in the front doorway emptied a whole magazine, but still Van Houten stayed upright, dropping the shotgun and swinging a short-stock Kalashnikov up on its strap, into the crook of his arm, and raking the front wall, sending the doorway shooter stumbling back out into the dust of the yard.

  The air reeked of cordite and burned wood and drywall dust and oily smoke. Fish lunged out into the ether from his cabinet cover and fired point-blank, the cumulative impact of the bullets striking Kevlar and tilting the fat man back into a shattered gun cabinet, where he braced himself and began to turn his automatic on Fish, now fully exposed, still five feet short of his destination, surely to kill him.

  And Fish thought: Tina is right about me.

  But Tina Z. was up on her feet, and moving, Fishlike; he watched, amazed, as she leapt unarmed onto Van Houten’s back and locked her arms together around his shoulders and neck in a choke hold and would not let go.

  Bullets from the Kalashnikov sprayed everywhere: Fish was able to drop, burrow, disappear under a collapsing shelf, a punctured water pipe spewing fountains of mist up through the shredded floorboard, the Feds and cops outside the shop running for cover as bullets popped through the clapboard walls and peppered the surrounding vehicles like hailstones.

  The gun dealer whirled, roaring, and slammed Tina Z. back into the wall, pinning her there, groping breathless for a silvery shaft of KA-BAR combat knife he conjured from the folds of his body armor, clutched with thick-fingered gloved hands, and clumsily began to stab wildly back at Tina. Her grasp slipped, he gulped air. Fish, hands and knees, groped for his weapon, and saw through the smoke and water mist Tina clawing at Van Houten’s face as the fat man kept thrusting the knife at her—saw her hands find his forehead, grip and tip it back from the Velcro neck guard of his armored suit—

  —to expose the pink unprotected flesh of his neck.

  Fish aimed and pulled the trigger of his gun.

  The barrel spat fire and it kicked hard.

  Van Houten’s head jerked once as a bullet went in through his chin and up through his skull and smacked against the Kevlar helmet’s underside and all the distorted bits and pieces of it rebounded back down through his brain, whereupon he toppled over and onto Tina Z., already dead before the two of them found the floor.

  “Get him off me! Get him off me!”

  It took Fish and two SWAT guys to dislodge the huge body so she could wriggle free from under it.

  “Ow,” Tina complained, coughing. Her eyes betrayed a terror to which she would never admit.

  “Fuck,” Fish said.

  Tina blinked back hot tears.

  The others were pouring in now, SWAT and Feds, their weapons rattling, shoes and boots beating a dirge on the floor. Fish helped Tina up.

  Admiringly: “You are a crazy-ass chick.” But he was shaking.

  “Fish. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” She looked in his eyes and saw through the bravado to the man who had just taken a life.

  “First time?” she asked quietly. But they were surrounded now, men pounding Hazel Fish on the back and admiring the kill. He smiled strangely.

  She let it go and gathered. “Hey. Do you know how much paperwork this is gonna mean?” Tina Z. said, pretending to be exasperated, and not wanting to think, even for a moment, about what she’d just been through.

  Fish, jacked in his adrenaline daze, drank the ensuing carnival in: Tina Z., the dead gun dealer, the shot-up store, the smell of spent weapons, the comforting blur of his brothers in arms, din of voices, fountain of tap water spraying, puddling.

  The exhilaration of being alive.

  “Sorry,” he said to her finally, meaning it, but unable to dim his grin. It felt unseemly; it felt earned. Much later, after the OIS team arrived to take his gun and his statement and drive him back to the city for all the required officer-involved-shooting protocols, the full weight of taking a life would press down on him. And, alone, he would cry.

  Miraculously, none of the SWAT team or support personnel had been hurt; the one sharpshooter had taken a round in his vest, Tina Z. felt like she’d been kicked by an elephant, a few others suffered minor cuts from fly
ing glass and debris.

  They searched the body and found keys, ChapStick, loose change, a money roll instead of a wallet, the ubiquitous pager, some loose pills, a thin little flip-top pocket tin containing a driver’s license, NRA membership, ATM and some business cards that Fish fanned out to discover, among them, leathered and well-thumbed, one with the U.S. Marines insignia embossed and a contact name and phone number for Sgt. Albert Zappacosta.

  On the back were figures and serial numbers scrawled in Bert’s childish cursive. Prices and product.

  Tina Z. reached for it. Her worried gaze found Fish. He didn’t stop her from taking the card and slipping it into the pocket of her jeans, and he didn’t bring it up when they were tallying the gun dealer’s personal inventory, or, the next day, in the detailed recounting of the attempted arrest, the shooting, and its aftermath.

  It would be a secret they shared. Not quite the one he wanted, but enough, she guessed.

  —

  KIRBY HAD TO MAKE the high desert drive during rush hour, with a swollen hand and the bandaged knuckles tender, but the X-ray was negative and he hadn’t needed stitches. Nobody asked why he’d punched a fridge. By the time he got to the crime scene it was crawling with news vans and on-air talent, and his jaw was sore from having clenched it for the duration of the grinding gridlock he’d endured.

  First thing when she saw him, Tina Z. told Kirby she had a bruise on her chest that she swore in quiet confidence had turned the inside of her breasts sickly Easter-egg colors already, “purple and yellow and pink striating right to the nipple,” and she offered to show him but he demurred, for now, although it did strangely stir him. (“I’m impressed,” he teased, “you even know what ‘striating’ means.”) But the whole exchange felt forced, her eyes were empty, distant, as if she were in two places at once, and he was still reeling from Sabrina Colter.

  Kirby deflected when she asked about his hand, skirted Fish’s lively and already embellished retelling of the takedown for anyone who was foolish enough to listen, and went instead into the ruined gun shop where the body of Van Houten was being zipped into a vinyl bag by the coroner’s crew, and an underfed criminalist wearing flip-down magnifying glasses was attempting with little success to breach the floor safe in the back room.