by Zack Parsons
“Christ!” He tried to grab the lighter off his lap. As he panicked and swerved, I leaned my arm past the bench seat and drew his gun from its holster. By the time he had the lighter and realized what was happening, I had his service revolver to the back of his head.
“Jesus, put it down,” said Flores. “You don’t mean that.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Ain’t gonna happen. I’m too close to this now to let you lock me in stew overnight. I know where we go from here.”
“You won’t shoot me,” he countered.
“Want to find out just how little you know me?” I lowered the pistol beneath the line of the seat but kept it aimed at him. “Now drive. Sunset Beach.”
I gave him the freak’s address. The bungalow where he’d kept Veronica captive. If he was the one who’d killed Ethan, then he’d have her there. If he wasn’t, well, I was out of luck, and Flores could lock me up for threatening him. I’d even cop to it.
I’ll never know how I missed the goddamn caravan we had on our tail. We pulled into the freak’s neighborhood, right up to the bungalow, and they were on top of us. Flores hadn’t even put the car into Park. A long black limousine pulled in behind the squad car, and two Mastiff cargo trucks trundled up to the front of the house.
“What the hell is this?” I said, but deep down I knew. I’d come to the right place and brought Harlan Bishop’s men with me. The buzz cuts and dark suits came pouring out of the trucks with their shotguns and grease guns in hand. Elias stepped out of the limousine.
“Do not hurt the girl!” he shouted.
The buzz cuts surrounded the house like real cops, taking up positions around the property, kneeling or lying in the grass, steadying their weapons on the hoods of cars. Half of them went storming in the front and back doors. They shot the locks right off with their shotguns and piled into the perfect little California bungalow. Once they’d gone inside, the real shooting started. It flashed behind scarlet curtains and rattled out into the street.
Neighbors came into their yards, perhaps thinking it was a movie being filmed. They gawped and pointed. More gunfire chattered inside the house. Glass shattered out of the windows, and bullet holes punched through the door. A wounded man came reeling out the front, a gun limp in his hand, and he collapsed on the stoop. One of the buzz cuts waiting outside dragged him out of the way as the shooting continued.
Beneath the gunfire I could hear, but not discern clearly, the panicked shouting of the buzz cuts inside the building. Their terror must have been paralyzing when they realized they’d just leaped into a cage with a beast. A vicious one, right out of a storybook without a happy ending.
A man came crashing through the house’s bay window, glass shattering all around him. His rag-doll body rolled in the grass and lay motionless. The curtains billowed through the window frames, and white smoke poured from the inside the house. Gunfire continued to rattle from within.
“Got the girl!” came the call from the back of the house.
The men forming the perimeter began to withdraw to their vehicles. More men came around from the back, and I saw Veronica, held between two buzz cuts, her face sprinkled with blood. She was stricken by the violence. Screaming hysterically for the men to let her go.
Behind them, another man carried a body over his shoulder. It was wrapped up in a bloodstained sheet. A woman’s red hair dangled from beneath the rolled cloth. They had Holly Webber’s body as well.
I couldn’t just sit there and watch them take Veronica. I threw open the door of Flores’s car and started to get out. Elias was waiting for me with his own gun leveled.
“Stop right there, Mr. Cord,” he said. “You’ve intervened enough in this matter.”
“I won’t let you take her,” I said, bringing up Flores’s gun.
“Ah, I’m afraid your options have been curtailed. You may lower your gun and do exactly as I say, or you may die. The choice is yours.”
The moment I lowered my gun, Elias snatched it from my hand. He motioned over two buzz cuts struggling with the weight of the freak’s limp body. Without his hat I could see that wispy hairs clung to his otherwise bald and heat-deformed head. One man had the feet and the other the shoulders. They dropped the freak unceremoniously into the street.
“He’s still alive,” said one of the buzz cuts. He lifted the freak’s head up. “I don’t know how. He’s been shot fifteen times. Should we finish him off?”
“Leave him,” said Elias, and then he indicated me. “And this one here as well.”
“What about the cop?”
“Kill him.”
Flores tried to drive away, but there was no chance. The rapid-fire pop of the grease guns echoed from the houses lining the street. The remaining onlookers screamed and ran inside, at last realizing they were not witnessing anything to be enjoyed. Windows shattered on the police custom. It swerved up onto the curb and struck a telephone pole, and the horn blew its singular ugly note. I ran to the car and saw Flores slumped against the wheel, clearly killed.
In my anger I turned to fight, but any hope of a suicidal confrontation with Bishop’s men was gone. Their vehicles were already pulling away and taking Veronica and Holly Webber with them.
The police radio was buzzing with calls about the shoot-out in Sunset Beach. Two major crimes in one night had the LAPD out in force. Shoebox Fords with screaming sirens rumbled down every main artery. Foot cops watched intersections and mobbed the haunts of lowlifes with answers. There were checkpoints at the exits of the highways.
There had been a massacre at the Bishop power plant. A cop dead in Sunset Beach. The whole city was on edge, and all of the LAPD was looking for me.
I turned off the police radio and switched on the Cadillac’s radio. The backlit dial glowed in the darkness of the car. NBC was playing “Archie.” I turned through the dial until I found breaking news on KABC.
“We, ah, we wanted to correct a statement from earlier,” said the newsman. “We are just getting word that the tragic shooting this afternoon at the San Pedro Power Station resulted in the death of millionaire industrialist Harlan Bishop and not, as originally reported, his son, Ethan Bishop. Los Angeles is in shock over this horrific rampage that claimed the lives of Harlan Bishop, police sergeant Hector Flores, and over fifteen others. I’m going to go to Tommy Hoolihan, KABC’s man on the street, for his two cents. Tommy.”
“Thank you, Chip,” said Tommy Hoolihan. “My two cents is this: I guarantee you that when this whole story shakes out, we are going to find that it was either the Chicanos or the Negroes out of Power City who did it. Youth assassins are rampant and spreading as far as Sunset Beach? Tell me something I don’t know. Bishop bottled up all those dangerous elements in—”
I switched the radio off. I’d parked the Cadillac beneath a half-built bridge, lights out, engine off. I was hiding out under part of the highway cloverleaf the crews had been working on for months. In among the tractors and trucks parked beside the road the Cadillac was just another work vehicle left to sit until construction resumed in the morning. Unless, of course, someone looked closely enough to realize it was a damn Cadillac.
The freak was sprawled in the backseat. I wasn’t too sure why I’d brought him. Enemy of my enemy maybe. Hoping for some answers. While I was searching him for the keys to his big car, I’d realized he was alive. He was also a heavy son of a bitch and was bleeding all over the place.
As I was lifting him into the backseat, I’d figured out why he was still breathing. There was some sort of homemade metal vest stitched into his shirt. Half an inch of iron pounded into the shape of a man’s chest. I’d seen the sort worn by bomber crews. The sort that didn’t do a bit of good when a Jap was putting fist-sized shells through the side of your airplane. Worked out a little bitter for the freak. Looked like most of the bullets had torn holes in his coat and bounced or skipped along the body armor’s curve and ended up in his legs and arms.
Still plenty of lead to kill a regular man. Even the big freak seemed on his w
ay to bleeding out as he lay gasping and gurgling on the backseat of the Cadillac. He hadn’t regained consciousness since I’d put him there, and I figured he would never wake up.
Without anyone to converse with, I’d spent the past hour going through my last pack of Bravos, nervously watching the lights of cars on the frontage road and trying to weave together the threads of Veronica Lambert, Harlan and Ethan Bishop, Holly Webber, and the big palooka drip-drying in the backseat. I thought I had it just about sorted. A theory that was working out.
“All right, listen to this,” I said to the freak. “Tell me if I got anything wrong.”
There was no answer from the peanut gallery. I continued.
“All along I was operating under the mistaken assumption that you were something new, some other sort of beast, on account of you being so huge,” I said, “but you’re not. You’re a Warren, like me. Not only that, you’re the Warren in the Rex Rawhide film with Isabella Webber. Her lover. Who else would be obsessively protecting her daughter’s friend from Bishop?
“Isabella was with Bishop when she died. Maybe he stole her from you, maybe you split up, I don’t know, but you acted to save her teenage daughter, didn’t you?” I waited for an answer, but the freak only groaned incoherently. “Dirty work, creeping up to that poor family’s house in Riverside. Did you kill them first or set the fire first and let them burn alive? That must have weighed on your conscience.
“Holly Webber was the last piece of Isabella left, so you got her out of Riverside and put her somewhere Bishop wouldn’t find her. The whole time you were working for Bishop. Doing what? Work too dirty even for me? For Elias? When Holly was old enough, you paid for her to live in the city. Slipping envelopes full of cash under the office door of a sleazebag apartment manager in South LA. I can only imagine the sick peeping you did as she grew into a woman like her mother.
“Mind if I smoke another?” I pinched my last cigarette between my lips and looked back at the freak. His eyes were deliriously open, his lipless mouth parted, and bloody drool spilling down his chin.
“Thanks, bud,” I said, and I continued with my theory.
“Your problem was that you didn’t erase all of Holly’s connections. You didn’t take care of Veronica Lambert, Holly’s best friend. So while Holly is living it up, bright young girl in the big city, all alone, she reaches back into her past for her good friend Veronica. Look-alike must have thrown you for a loop. Threw me for one too. But Veronica saw something, some artifact or picture Holly had, and she convinced Holly to blackmail Bishop.
“That’s what happened out in Cranford.” I cracked the window so the cool night air would suck some of the smoke out of the Cadillac. “Holly was blackmailing Bishop.
“She wrote him a letter, told him to drop the cash in the mailbox of an abandoned farm. They brought her the cash. Cash that flies like confetti out of her hands when she’s run down. Blackmail money that ends up caught in the branches of the roadside scrub. Nobody was trying to kill her. You were trying to rescue her, weren’t you? But you poor, big, scary beast. Look at yourself. You spooked her, and she ran for help. Ran for the road. Was it a random accident of some passing motorist, or was it Elias and his boys?”
“Them,” the freak wheezed, nearly causing me to drop my cigarette. “It was them. Left the money in the mailbox. Came back to close the trap. Going ... too fast. I should have ... should have let Bishop ...”
He paused, eyes glassy and damp with pain.
“Whiskey,” he finally said.
There was a little Brown Barrel left in my flask. I handed it back to him, and he sat forward. Christ, the smell of the blood. It was as strong as anything since the trenches, since the massacre in that train back in Spark.
“Why protect Veronica?” I asked.
The freak slopped the whiskey into his lipless mouth. When he’d drained the flask, he answered.
“Holly loved her,” he said. “More than friends ... I ...”
“She was a pervert?”
“No,” he said. “A sister. Like a sister. As much as two people can feel for each other.”
“Who are you to Bishop?” I asked. “I could never figure that out. I saw you leaving the power station in San Pedro. What do you do for him?”
“Judge,” the freak wheezed.
“Buddy, I’m the damn Judge,” I said.
“Frontier sheriff, Casper,” said the freak, and he laughed. It was a bubbling, gurgling laugh that ended in a choking fit. The freak recovered and lifted his head. A translucent orange fluid was running out from a crack in the burn tissue on his head. “I am a policeman; you are a frontier sheriff. Last of the lone Judges. Bishop ... saw our numbers ... multiplying. Needed a force ... to preserve the secret.”
“An army?”
“Police,” he reiterated. “He was right. I helped him ... to keep the secret ... to protect ...”
He slumped back in the seat. I slapped him awake. His eyes came open again, reeling, pale marbles flicking back and forth in the livid raisin of his face.
“There are more like you?” I demanded.
He nodded, unable to talk. Bishop subverting the whole process of the Covenant was nothing new, but to learn he’d developed his own, separate enforcement arm was a shock to the system. I’d lived for over fifteen years figuring I was the only Judge, and here was a guy telling me we had a whole court system.
“One thing I can’t figure,” I said, “is why Holly Webber had my phone number. Did you do that?”
“Gave it to her ... years ... years ago.”
“Why?” I demanded. “You told me to keep away.”
“In case something happened ... to me ... I needed a man who would protect her.” He looked away from me, out the window. “I knew ... could trust you. Knew you ... weren’t ... entirely Bishop’s man. You were your own ... your own ...”
I was losing him.
“Snap out of it.” I grabbed him and shook him. “You don’t die yet, you son of a bitch. Wake up!”
His eyes rebounded from the gravity of unconsciousness. He peered right into mine and said, “Kyushu.”
I let go of him.
“Gardener?”
“I ... yes ...” he said. “You left me ... to die ... but I lived. They put me back together.”
“Ishii shot you,” I said. “The cabin burned... .”
“Yes,” said Gardener, and he leaned forward, his awful, melted face materializing from the darkness.
Atop the black rocks of the holy mountain. Gardener, holding that damn green box, Ishii stepping away. Gardener emptied the contents onto the table. I expected it to be filled with the letters Annie had exchanged with Gideon. I couldn’t imagine anything else inside that box, but what was within made little sense to me.
“What is that?” I demanded, pointing to the papers and photographs stamped with GEHEIM that spilled out.
Gardener was ignoring me. He hung the lantern on a ceiling hook. He drew a flask from his pocket and began pouring strong alcohol onto the papers, overflowing the table and saturating the floor. I started toward him, my fists raised.
“Stay back,” Gardener warned.
I smashed the flask from his hands. Gardener threw his Ronson onto the doused documents and photographs, and they burst into flames. Ishii seized his opportunity. He lunged at Gardener, throwing him against the wall of the cabin.
As they struggled, I tried to extinguish the fire. The flames were weak in the thin air, but Gardener had thoroughly doused the pages in the alcohol. Blue flames licked at my shoes. Cinders burst around my legs and ignited fire in the saturated tatami.
The fire was consuming typewritten pages in German bearing names like Hoffman and Rascher. There were photographs too, of Warrens, dead and naked on tables. Dead in a row in the uniforms of different services and even different nations. But there was something more.
“Kill him!” shouted Gardener as he wrestled with Ishii. “Kill him, damn you.”
I ignored him,
reaching into the spreading flames for the photographs. They were crumbling and burning, disintegrating before my eyes, but I glimpsed things that were impossible.
These were photographs of photographs, grainy and difficult enough to see if they were not also disintegrating in my hands. I glimpsed Warren Groves, his head in a pressure helmet. Another photograph was of a crane that held a golden sphere suspended in a familiar, rocky chamber. There was a photograph of a complex diagram, like two tornadoes meeting at the whirling tips. A crowded unit portrait of stoic men in Air Force dress uniforms, slightly different ages, slightly different haircuts, and the same serious face. My face.
The photographs had spilled from a single folder. As the fire consumed the last of the photographs, the folder’s tab remained. Written in Japanese characters and then in English was the word Westward.
“Shoot him!” shouted Gardener.
He and Ishii were tangled on the floor in a fight to the death, surrounded by flames, nearly engulfed in them. Gardener was pinning Ishii down, but Ishii seized Gardener by the throat and began choking him. I found Gardener’s pistol, and I aimed it at them, unsure which I wanted to shoot more.
The lantern, hanging up amid the creeping flames, exploded, showering the cabin in burning oil. I fired, unsure of which man I hit. I recoiled from the intense heat and ran outside. In moments the cabin was completely consumed, inside and out. I stood and watched it burn to a blackened piled of timbers. I was sure that both men were dead beneath the rubble.
“Westward,” I said to Gardener, who lay dying in the backseat of the Cadillac. “What was it?”
“You want to ... find out?” he asked. “Follow ... Veronica... .”
“Where?” I said. “To Chatholm? Back to the power station?”
Gardener’s smile was horrible.
“To New Mexico,” he said. “To the Pool. He’s going to make her ... forever. And your ... your answers are there.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was an easy way back to New Mexico and a hard way back. The hard way was driving for a solid day, without rest, over mountains and into the desert, in a car being hunted by the police. The easy way was to put a gun into my mouth and blow my noodles out, erase all the scars, come back clean and new out of the Pool. I preferred that option.