The Warlord w-1

by Jason Frost

  Eric nodded.

  Fisher frowned. He'd thought that last little comment deserved at least a smile. He prided himself on his sense of humor. After all, he wasn't like most of the other dumb guards in the company. He had a college education, a degree in anthro-fucking-pology. He'd always wanted to discover some primitive tribe hidden from civilization for centuries. Wouldn't that be something? First white man among all the bare-fitted women he could handle. But when he'd graduated, it was hard to find someone who'd pay him to look for lost tribes and bare tits. Still, he was doing all right for now. Getting by.

  When they'd called him this morning to take over for Gus, he'd been thrilled. Working the D.A.'s office was a plum. Used to be only cops did that duty, but what with budget cuts and all, they figured it'd be cheaper to hire private guards. Fisher could understand that. The pay sucked. And you had to buy your own uniforms and those ugly black patent leather shoes. But the work wasn't too hard and he made enough to make payments on his Camaro and still keep Debbie supplied with that henna crap and an occasional lid of domestic grass. Besides, he grinned, she got horny as hell when he practiced his fast-draw at home.

  "Anyway, Gus'll probably be back by the end of the week."

  Eric nodded again and started through the door.

  "Wait a second, man," Fisher said, blocking the way with his clipboard. "You forgot to tell me your name."

  "Ravensmith. Eric Ravensmith."

  "Oh, right," Fisher sighed. "The Fallows trial. Go right in."

  Eric did.

  The handsome, middle-aged woman stabbing her pencil into the electric sharpener looked up and smiled. "Good morning, Mr. Ravensmith."

  "Hi, Lynn." Eric tried to make his voice pleasant, but it just came out flat and dry. "F. Lee Bailey in?"

  "Yes, but don't let him hear you call him that. He and Mr. Bailey were adversaries once in court, not friendly ones either. Calls him Beetle Bailey."

  Eric pushed open the inner office door and walked in. Luther Nichols sat behind his desk and fired a rubber band at Eric. It bounced off his chest.

  "What's that for?" Eric asked.

  "I heard that F. Lee Bailey remark, buster."

  "Do you prefer Melvin Belli?"

  "The one they call King of Tarts?"

  "I think that's torts."

  "Ha! The only torte he knows is the kind you eat. That son of a bitch weighs more than you, me and Lynn. The Incredible Bulk."

  Eric stooped over and picked up the rubber band. His face was grim as he flopped down into the chair next to the assistant district attorney's desk.

  "You look like shit," Luther said.

  "Thanks. I needed that."

  "There's no point in getting morose. They won't announce the verdict for another hour."

  "How do you think it'll go?"

  Luther shrugged. "The operation was a success, let's just hope the patient doesn't die."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means we ran a smooth trial. We traced the Simpleton kid-"

  "That's Sempleton."

  "A rose by any other name. Anyway, we traced him back to Fallows. Proved the gun was supplied by Fallows. That ought to be worth something."

  Eric shook his head, rubbed his chin. "I blew it, didn't I?"

  "Well, it didn't help that you'd used a cheese grater on the kid's face to make him talk. Him sitting on the stand with the scabs still showing on his cheek didn't advance our case. Or that broken wrist. Something about a cast makes a jury nervous. Besides, most of what you found out was inadmissible."

  "I had to, Luther," Eric nodded, his voice firm, unapologetic. "I had to know that Fallows was behind it. I couldn't take the chance."

  "The cops-"

  'The cops couldn't have made him talk. He'd have just sat there until Fallows' lawyer came. At least my way I knew for sure."

  Luther didn't say anything. This wasn't the time. He rearranged a wisp of thin, blond hair back on top of his balding head. "Give me your honest impression. Am I balder now than when this trial started?"

  Eric looked up at him, smiled in spite of himself. "Yeah, that one strand that went from ear to ear is gone. I think I saw it fall during summation."

  "Damn, I knew I shouldn't have hit the table for emphasis. The shock waves probably loosened it at the root."

  Eric stared into Luther's face, studying each crease and wrinkle. He was an assistant D.A. in a year when the D.A. was running for mayor of Los Angeles. This case had been too hot for a politician to handle personally, so it had been passed along the ranks to Luther Nichols, destined to be an assistant D.A. for the rest of his life. No political instincts, at least none he cared to do anything about. A tall, stooped man whose suits were always wrinkled, too loose, and ten years out of style. Still, he was a good man, respected by other lawyers, adored by his employees. But Eric could see he was lying.

  "Come on, Luther. What aren't you telling me?"

  Luther hunched over the pile of briefs on his desk, pretended to look for something. "What do you mean, Eric?"

  "I mean, I didn't say anything when you first brought a security guard into this case to stand outside the office. But then I took a midnight drive past your house a couple nights ago and-"

  "You what!"

  "I drove by and saw the plainclothes guy in the Honda parked along the street. Now there's some dumb-ass kid out there who says Gus is supposed to have some kind of flu. What haven't you been telling me?"

  Luther took a deep breath, let the air out slowly. Repeated it a couple times, pressing his long fingers against his stomach. "Biofeedback technique," he said. "Supposed to calm me."

  "Does it?"

  "Don't I look calm?" He leaned back into his chair, swiveled around to look out the grime-streaked window behind him. The view of Parking Lot B wasn't worth the effort. "Gus is dead. Thrown through the window of his third floor apartment late last night. Neck was broken."

  "Fallows!"

  "Maybe, but there's no proof. Gus reported some threats last week. Someone wanted him to take a walk at a certain time, leave the office unguarded. He refused."

  'That's Fallows all right. Probably intended to plant a bomb."

  "That's what I figured. So I had a guard put on my home."

  "Better get a different one. Yours stinks. Any of Fallows' men could spot him a block away. They'd slit his throat before he even knew he was dying."

  "I can't send my family away like you did, Eric."

  "Why not?"

  "Because this isn't the first time we've been threatened. Every so often I get a case in which somebody thinks they can scare me off. Believe me, I'm easily scared. Threats make me constipated. Worse than cheese." The grin fell from his face, replaced by a worried frown. "If anything happened to my family because of my stubbornness, I don't know what I'd do. But I can't pack them away every time some nut shouts boo at me."

  "Fallows is no nut, Luther. He's crazy, but not a nut."

  "I know."

  "Do you? Let me tell you something about him, Luther."

  "I know all about him. I read the transcripts of the court-martial. At least, what was left after they cut out all the classified information. It was sickening."

  "Yeah, well even unclassified that transcript didn't tell half the story. I haven't even told Annie everything. If I had, we'd both be waking up in a cold sweat every night."

  Luther leaned back into his chair and clasped his bony fingers together. He'd gotten to know Eric pretty well during the two months of this trial. They'd lunched together almost every day. And Eric had come over for some of Trudi's home cooking at least twice a week. But there was some distant part of himself that Eric had always kept locked away. Oh, he was polite and friendly, charming as hell-there wasn't a woman in the place, including Trudi, who didn't let her eyes linger a little wistfully on Eric's hard physique and rough-hewn good looks. But he wasn't the kind of man to spill his guts at the drop of a hat as seemed to be fashionable these days. Luther looked i
nto Eric's flat reddish-brown eyes that had grown flatter and colder during the course of the trial, and waited for him to speak. Though Luther had been in Nam for only six weeks before taking a Cong slug in the leg and being shipped back home, he knew that when a man like Eric was going to talk about the war, then that was something special.

  "You already know some of this," Eric said, staring out the dirty window as if he were watching it all being replayed on videotape. "I mean about my parents and all."

  Luther said nothing, listened intently.

  "I grew up in Arizona, the part that looks like a Hollywood set for post-nuclear war America. The main agricultural product was sand. My dad was an ex-marine, complete with tattoos of snakes and dragons and naked women on each arm."

  "Sounds tough," Luther said.

  Eric laughed. "Yeah, he was tough, but not mean. He was short, barely qualified for the service, but strong as hell. Even his ear lobes had muscles. Tried a lot of different jobs. Car salesman. Beer-bottling factory. Even tried prospecting. Just wasn't cut out to make much money. Took him a lot of years to figure that out, though. Was almost forty before he found out what he really was."

  "A politician?"

  "No. An artist. Yeah, shocked the hell out of him too. Soon as he realized that, he married, had me, and started in carving the mountains into giant sculptures of Indian chiefs. Mom taught archaeology at the university, then drove home after classes. Every night he'd take us hiking up to the mountain to check on his daily progress. Never looked much different to me, just a lot of jutting rock, but the two of them discussed it for hours until it got so I could see it too.

  "We lived right near the Hopi reservation. Since Dad was carving a Hopi chief, they were pretty friendly with us. I grew up with their kids, learned a lot about their customs, rituals, beliefs. Their chief, Big Bill Tenderwolf, used to take me on long hikes and teach me about the desert. How to survive. Find food and water. Fight. I never thought too much about it until I got drafted into the army during the war."

  "I thought you'd enlisted."

  "No way. My father would have killed me. You know the story, 'Don't make the same mistake I did, son.' Anyway, his health wasn't very good anyway, so I took a year off after high school to help him carve his damn mountain. Twelve hours a day on the business end of a jackhammer and you start to wonder if you've done some permanent damage to your privates. That's when I got drafted. After an armload of tests, some hotshot loaded down with medals and ribbons came around and lectured me on the Green Berets. It sounded more interesting than what I was doing so I volunteered. Only I washed out after two months."

  Luther looked surprised. "You washed out?"

  Eric snapped the rubber band in his hand and smiled. "A discipline problem. Oh, it wasn't their fault. They bent over backwards to keep me in. Practically let me shove broomsticks up their noses. But it just didn't work out. Seems I didn't like people telling me what to do. Hell, I was only nineteen and I'd had my fill of the military just listening to Dad's stories. I got surly, 'rebellious' is the word they used, whenever some fat-assed sergeant would tell me to give him fifty pushups because I didn't drink my coffee fast enough. So they transferred me to another outfit." He paused, his face darkening. "Something called the Night Shift."

  Luther's throat went dry. After only a couple days in Nam he'd heard some men whispering about a special squad of men even more highly trained than the Green Berets. They were especially ruthless, given jobs that no one else could do. Hell, no one else would do. When orders came through that were especially suicidal, the standard line among the men was, "Save it for the Night Shift." Or when they marched through some enemy camp and found a hundred dead Cong scattered around the ground in puddles of blood, then someone would say, "Looks like the Night Shift cleaning up again." No one was ever pointed out as being one, no one ever asked. They were around somewhere, and you felt better knowing they were on your side.

  "We were a strange group," Eric nodded, his lips drawn thinly into something like a smile. "The best of the worst. Hardcases. Guys who didn't like to follow orders, like me. Guys who could kill you with the flick of one finger and then build a portable radio from parts of your body. We were trained in every possible skill there was, from flying to diving to mountain climbing. And they were pretty lax about giving orders. For awhile. Until they plucked us out of our training camp in Florida one Saturday during the World Series and dropped us in the middle of some Vietnamese jungle. Then our new C.O. told us his policy: either follow his orders or he'd leave us to die. One of the new men, a joker named Kelley, thought he was kidding and snickered. The C.O. spun around and clubbed him with his rifle butt until he was unconscious. Then he moved the rest of us out and left Kelley lying there to die."

  "I read Kelley's testimony," Luther said. "You carried him all day until camp was made."

  Eric shrugged. "If it had happened a month later, I might not have been so eager. Still, the C.O. had me stand watch all night for a week because of it. That was my first run-in with Col. Dirk Fallows. The rest of the war was more of the same. Hit and git, Fallows called it. We'd swoop into a camp and kill everything that moved, then mutilate the corpses to scare the rest of the Cong. That was Fallows' brainchild," He took a deep breath, fired the rubber band against the window. "We were pretty successful, though we lost a lot of men. Still, we hurt them and hurt them bad. Fallows was the best jungle fighter I'd ever seen, and after awhile the men would do anything he said. The ultimate discipline is to turn your men into disciples. And we were."

  "You too?"

  "I never liked him, not like the others. But I knew my only chance for survival was to do what I was told."

  "Until that Sunday morning. The day of the Easter Massacre."

  "Yeah, until then. Hell, you read the report, you know what happened. The civilian village. Fallows crucifying dogs first then old men, finally women and children. Trying to get information from them that we already had. 'Just teaching them the meaning of Easter,' he'd laugh, 'like the Easter bunny.' I tried to stop him. Got this for my trouble." He touched the scar, traced it lightly with his fingertips along his neck, jaw, cheek. "A bayonet heated over a fire can do some serious damage. He crucified half the village before he got bored and moved on, leaving me behind, tied up in an enemy village whose people he'd just tortured and killed, I thought I was dead for sure. But they knew why I'd been left behind and they let me go. Without food or water or my gun. They figured under the circumstances they were being generous enough. I couldn't argue. It took me two weeks to make it back to one of our camps."

  "And that's when you reported the crucifixions?"

  "Yeah. But no one wanted to hear about them. None of the officers I talked to admitted to ever hearing of the Night Shift or Col. Dirk Fallows. It took awhile, but eventually I found a lieutenant general who wasn't afraid to press the matter. It went to a court-martial and it was my word against the rest of the entire squad. Except Kelley. I guess we looked sincere, because they sentenced that son of a bitch to twenty the hard way. Only they forgot to throw away the key and he got out in twelve. Five months ago."

  "They should've told you. Warned you. "

  "Yeah. Me and Kelley. I phoned him the same night the Sempleton kid broke into my house. No answer. He hasn't shown up for work or been seen by anyone since that night."

  "Maybe he heard something, took off," Luther said weakly.

  "Maybe. In the meantime, Annie and the kids are stashed someplace safe. My mom, however, wouldn't leave her students."

  There was a morose pause, one Luther needed to fill. "How's she like teaching in the same university as her son?"

  "A mother's dream, even if it meant leaving Arizona after Dad's death. She refers to her teaching here as 'enlightening the surfing masses.' "

  "Isn't that supposed to be suffering masses?"

  'This is California."

  Luther laughed. "Right."

  Eric looked at his watch. "About that time."

&nbs
p; "Let me wash up and I'll be right with you." Luther stood up, brushed a few wrinkles from a hopelessly creased jacket, and strode off into his private bathroom.

  Eric felt the film of sweat that had formed on his face as he'd recounted his past-Nam, the Easter Massacre, Dirk Fallows-and felt the sudden need to wash too, scrub himself clean. He went out the door, passed Lynn, who had the phone tucked between ear and shoulder. He started to mime a few words.

  "It's okay," she said. "They've got me on hold."

  "Tell Perry Mason I'll be back in a couple minutes."

  "Will do."

  He opened the door, saw the young guard, Fisher, snap to a kind of attention, then seeing it wasn't his boss, sort of sag against the door jamb again. "Kinda slow today," Fisher nodded with a lazy grin.

  "The big rush doesn't start for another five minutes. That's when the mayor usually comes by."

  "Really?" Fisher said, straightening up, tugging at his tie, tucking his shirt in.

  Eric walked silently down the hall. Everyone else walking down the hall made little clicking noises or squeaking sounds depending on the kind of shoes they were wearing. Eric made no noise at all.

  How's he do that? Fisher wondered as Eric ducked into the men's room.

  "Weird," Fisher shrugged, slumping back against the wall as he decided the mayor bit was probably a gag. He went back to his usual activity, trying to figure how many more hours he had to work to earn enough to buy a new Sony Walkman. He could hardly wait. Then he could wire up when he went jogging, listen to Foreigner and Blondie. Or when he was hitting tennis balls against the wall, practicing his ground stroke. Jackson Browne would be good for ground strokes. That's what was so neat about those things. You could have the right kind of background music for whatever you did. Like in the movies. It made everything you did seem more dramatic. Like Travolta walking down the street to "Stayin' Alive" in Saturday Night Fever. Now it would be Daryl Fisher jogging along the beach to "Heart of Glass."

  Fisher was so excited by the prospect that he didn't notice the two men in three-piece suits carrying briefcases as they walked by him. Didn't notice them nod to each other, then slip into the men's room behind Eric.