Get Real

by Erik Carter

  Her eyes were cold and determined, scanning over the dozens of people. El Vacío could read faces, and there was something in her eyes, something aside from the tension of the moment. A bit of uncertainty. She clearly wasn’t a rookie, so it wasn’t that. More like a lack of conviction in herself. Fear of mistake.

  She was attractive, in a slightly brawny kind of way. El Vacío had assessed her curves in the half moment he’d given himself to glance over her. And as he stepped past her, inches separating them, he could smell her sweat. He savored it.

  Out the door. Onto the sidewalk.

  A bit of relief as he felt a little more space. Just a little. The sidewalk was teeming with people. All frightened, all fleeing. There had been a burst of initial panic after El Vacío had taken his shot, but it had turned into utter madness after the female cop had returned fire, laying down several rounds.

  In front of him, about a block away, he could see the corner where both the Chevette and the Pantera had turned—California Street. He headed in that direction.

  Ahead was a trashcan. He shrugged off his jacket again and casually dumped it as he walked by, relieving himself also of the scope, suppressor, and ammunition. He now had nothing on his person tying him to the shooting. Aside from a harmless walking cane.

  He had stocked up when he first arrived in the city, so he had more scopes, suppressors, and ammo waiting for him at his motel. He’d custom-built his rifle, but scopes and suppressors he acquired as needed and disposed of readily. He ran through them like a normal man ran through walking shoes.

  Losing the jacket also gave him another change of look—a light yellow, short-sleeved shirt, his third appearance in a only few minutes. He was going to need anonymity again.

  Very soon.

  Chapter Thirty

  Dale was once more running down a steep hill toward the bay, just as he had the previous day when he chased the imposter Jonathan Fair. And, framed between the canyon walls of city buildings, he once again saw Bay Bridge in the distance, one of its towers standing tall over the water.

  Ahead, Fair took a left onto Montgomery Street.

  Dale was several feet behind him, and it was a couple moments before he took the corner too. As he did, he saw the pointed monolith that was Transamerica Pyramid towering above the city, a couple blocks away.

  Dale scanned Montgomery Street. Fair was nowhere to be seen. But all Dale had to do was follow the excited stares and pointing of the pedestrians. Their attention was focused on the loading dock of the building on the corner—a multistory hotel—where the most wanted man in the country had evidently just fled.

  Dale sprinted into the dock. It was dark with muted, brownish light. The air was thick and stuffy. Hot. Dusty. There was the laundry smell of bleach, which came from several rolling, six-foot carts overstuffed with white sheets, hanging over the edges. A ramp was in front of him, and at the back wall of the ramp—which was mounted with several rubber bumpers, the types made of stacked, recycled tires—was Fair, climbing over the ledge.

  Dale dashed up to him, closed the distance. As he did, Fair thrust a kick at him, just as he cleared the top. His shoe caught Dale in the shoulder, jolting him backward with a dull pain.

  Fair ran into the maze of wheeled laundry carts as Dale scrambled over the wall. Dale got to his feet and looked forward just in time to see Fair pushing one of the large carts right at him. Dale shielded himself and absorbed the heavy impact with his arms. He stumbled, nearly falling back over the wall.

  Fair ran for a door a few feet away, open, partially blocked by another laundry cart. It led to a service hallway. He cleared the doorway and disappeared. Dale sprinted after him.

  The hallway was brighter than the dock, lit by sickly, depressing fluorescent lighting. The walls were painted white and heavily scuffed. Fair stole a look back at Dale through his square-framed glasses. Dale’s boots pounded the floor, and he felt himself drawing closer to Fair, though he also felt his lungs burning terribly, begging for oxygen. There was a Hispanic maid at the end of the hall, and she plastered herself against the wall, waiting for the two men to pass. She was clearly frightened, but Dale still perceived a twinkle of amazement in her eyes after recognizing Fair.

  Another laundry cart in front of them, and as Fair ran past, he yanked it, rolling it to the side, trying to block the path. Dale anticipated him and made a quick juke move, dodging the cart before it smashed into the wall. Fair’s tactic had cost him some time, and now Dale was right on his heels.

  There was a door in front of them at the end of the service hallway. It opened up before them, and another maid walked in. Her eyes lit up. Behind her, Dale could see the inside of the hotel. An opulent hallway—ornate wallpaper, plush carpet. It was teeming with people wearing lanyards bearing name-tags.

  A conference.

  Dale couldn’t let Fair get in there, slip into the masses of people and disappear again. They were only a few feet away from the door. So Dale had to make a move.

  He leapt.

  For just a moment, Dale was Superman. An eagle. His arms stretched out before him and his legs behind him. He was soaring. He felt pretty damn cool, and he imagined himself looking something like Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson in a revenge film. Slow motion. A gritty, determined, and utterly badass look on his face. But he knew the truth was he probably didn’t look half as awesome as he thought he did.

  But it did the trick nonetheless.

  Because Dale crashed right into Fair’s back.

  The two of them tumbled to the floor in a rolling mass, skidded forward a few feet. When they came to a stop, Dale was on top of Fair. Dale clenched his fist, ready for whatever might happen.

  But nothing happened.

  Fair simply looked up at him through his famous glasses with a look of defeat. As brave and noble as the Felix Lyons personality was, apparently he was no fighter.

  At least not in the physical sense.

  Felix had resigned himself to being caught.

  And then something occurred to Dale. A happy thought.

  He felt a jolt of pride.

  Dale had done something pretty amazing. He’d captured the man the whole damn world had been searching for.

  Dale had caught Jonathan Fair.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  El Vacío watched the crowd from across the street as the cop escorted the handcuffed Jonathan Fair out of the hotel’s loading dock. There were excited screams, flashes from cameras.

  The pack mentality of fervent human fanaticism. Idiotic. Disappointing. But it was one of the many primal traits of the human psyche that fueled El Vacío’s employment. So let the fools have their simpleminded fun.

  El Vacío stood beside a phone booth near the newspaper stand where he’d purchased the magazine toward which he was was feigning interest. The cop guided Fair down the sidewalk, and as he did, he scanned his surroundings, no doubt looking to see where more gawkers might be coming from.

  His gaze landed on El Vacío. Their eyes met.

  El Vacío turned back to his magazine. Waited a moment. And glanced back up.

  The cop was still looking at El Vacío. Staring right at him.

  That confirmed it. The cop recognized El Vacío as the sniper from the roof, even with the change of outfits and the mustache.

  Again, El Vacío was impressed with this cop. The guy had it where it counted. Back in Chinatown, he’d shown his analytical prowess. And, when he stood up and ran to his car, knowing that there was a sniper on the roof, he’d shown bravery. Now he had shown attention to detail.

  The next few seconds were critical for El Vacío. Right now, the cop’s mind would be questioning itself, wondering if he really recognized the man across the street as the sniper he’d seen for only a half moment. His mind would be telling him that while the man might look similar to the sniper, he was wearing a different outfit. And hadn’t the sniper been clean-shaven?

  El Vacío needed to disappear during this moment of confusion before the cop c
onvinced himself that his mind wasn’t playing tricks on itself, before his full attention returned to his very important business of brining in Jonathan Fair.

  El Vacío waited for just a moment, until the crowd pulled the cop’s attention away. And then he darted off.

  Vanished.

  As much as brazen, brute strength was important to El Vacío’s work, so too was stealth, and by the time the cop looked back up, El Vacío was well hidden.

  He peered out from his veiled location and watched as the cop scanned about, pulling Jonathan Fair with him as he tried to push through the crowd to get a glimpse at where he’d last seen El Vacío. Determination, clearly, was another one of the cop’s attributes.

  But look as he might, the cop was not going to find El Vacío. And as he watched, El Vacío saw the cop resign himself to the fact that the suspicious man he’d seen across the street had disappeared. He then continued down the sidewalk with Fair, the crowd of onlookers following them.

  El Vacío would be following them as well.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Paulie took a bite and chewed slowly, forced himself to swallow. He put the sandwich down. Only a small corner of it had been eaten. He hadn’t had an appetite for days. If there was one way to shed extra pounds, it was by losing your prodigal son into a firestorm of ravenous bloodsuckers, all of whom wanted to hunt him down.

  The prospect of an all-out bloodbath of a mob war didn’t help matters either.

  He was in a back, private room at one of his restaurants. The door was shut, the room closed off. The muffled sound of Irish folk music could be heard from the main restaurant beyond. Fiddle and a classic song. The room was dark, and the only other person with him was Danny, who sat at the other side of the table, ravenously destroying his own sandwich.

  Danny swallowed another bite, took a long swig of his beer, then finished his thought. “Which means Beau Lawton really bailed us out. SFPD busted eight potential Alfonsi hits. They were gonna hit us simultaneously, all across the city.”

  Paulie took the napkin from his lap and wiped his face. “Angelo was trying to make a statement. He thinks we’ve been hitting him through Jonathan. So he was gonna hit us back even harder.”

  “And he still has El Vacío out hunting for John,” Danny said.

  Paulie had been trying not to think of that. He had teams of men scouring the city for the assassin, but aside from one report of a fleeting glimpse during the madness at Chinatown, El Vacío had been completely invisible.

  “Angelo is a fool. He wants to put us all at war,” Paulie said. “So let the battles begin. Call in all the boys. We’re moving on this. Today.”

  Danny grinned devilishly. “You got it, Pop.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Dale had built an image up in his head of what the crowd outside the San Francisco Hall of Justice would look like on the the occasion when the notorious Jonathan Fair was finally brought in.

  But, as Dale led Fair up the steps, the real crowd was even thicker than the one he’d dreamed up.

  There must have been at least a hundred people there, a mix of media and fanatics. Television cameras. Cardboard signs. Wigs. Plastic, square-framed glasses. Screams of joy. Even some screams of anguish. Questions from the reporters. Shouted commands from the uniformed cops trying to control the crowd.

  Dale guided Fair toward the doors, kept his hand on the man’s left arm, which was behind his back, handcuffed to the other. People shoved in from all directions. Cameras and microphones smashed into Dale. He heard his pseudonym shouted from all directions. Melbourne! Mr. Melbourne! People in the knock-off square glasses and T-shirts bearing the phrase Where, Oh Where Is Jonathan Fair? pulled at Dale’s arms. The reporters shouted questions at him and Fair.

  Jonathan Fair, why did you do it?

  How many more robberies were planned?

  Mr. Melbourne, how did you apprehend Fair?

  Dale didn’t respond. Neither did Fair.

  It took them two full minutes just to make it through the crowd and into the building.

  After processing Jonathan Fair, Dale now found himself alone. He scratched at the beard for a moment before making himself stop. He’d sweated a lot during the chase, and now the stupid thing was itching like crazy again. The adhesive felt almost tingly against his skin.

  He made his way to the third floor, where he would meet up with the rest of the task force. He had eschewed the elevator in favor of the stairs. Dale did so as often as was reasonably possible for a little boost of exercise during his day. It was also helpful at times like this when a moment of solitude was difficult to come by but desperately needed.

  He reached the third-floor landing, paused for just a moment, and pushed through the door.

  The hallway was crowded with cops and other officials, and they burst into applause when they saw him. He heard his temporary name again.

  Good job, Melbourne!

  Well done.

  Melbourne, you son of a bitch!

  At the back of the hallway, clapping loudest, were Beau Lawton and Eliseo Delacruz.

  But Dale didn’t see Yorke.

  He stepped into the crowd. As he had with the mob of people outside the building, Dale felt strangers’ hands all over him again—slapping him on the back, patting his shoulders.

  From behind a couple tall men, Yorke appeared. She stepped toward him and looked up from the floor. Dale stopped.

  “Congratulations,” she said quietly with a half smile.

  In the rush of excitement capturing Jonathan Fair, Dale had failed to yet consider how it would affect Yorke and her quest to upgrade her status from that of a screwup. He tried to come up with something consoling to say, but before he could, two more people pushed through the crowd and approached them—Delacruz and Lawton.

  “We sure do owe you a debt of gratitude,” Delacruz said and cast his eyes at Yorke mid-sentence.

  She looked away.

  “Just doin’ my job,” Dale said, trying to downplay it as much as he could for Yorke’s sake. He turned his attention to Lawton. “I understand that congratulations are in order for you as well. Your raids went well, I hear.”

  “Couldn’t have gone better,” Lawton said with a million-dollar smile. “With the two families going at each other, all we had to do was position ourselves at all the known establishments.”

  “The city appreciates you capturing Jonathan Fair,” Delacruz said to Dale. “But we need more. We’re greedy like that.”

  He handed Dale a folder.

  Dale looked from the folder to Lawton, gave him a mischievous grin. “So you guys trust my ‘silly history research’ now?”

  Lawton laughed. “You’ve proven yourself.”

  Dale opened the folder. Inside were Lee Kimble’s records from Napa State Hospital.

  “We need you to figure out what Jonathan Fair was planning with this guy,” Delacruz said, pointing to the photo of Kimble that sat on the top of the papers within the folder. “Then we need you to catch him.”

  Dale and Yorke sat at a table in an interrogation room. They were side-by-side, and opposite them was Jonathan Fair.

  Jonathan Fair...

  It wasn’t quite real to Dale yet. So much had been made of Jonathan Fair’s escape. And now he’d been caught.

  And Dale had been the one to do it.

  Though Dale had a bit of a reputation as an arrogant bastard, it was mostly in good fun—and mostly about his devilish good looks. In regards to things of substance, Dale did his darndest to remain humble. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride from being the person who brought in Jonathan Fair—because he also couldn’t help but get caught up a bit in the hubbub. Dale had such a strong personality that he almost never succumbed to the fleeting fancies of popular consciousness. While there were plenty of people claiming to be unique in this “Me Decade” of the 1970s, Dale was truly an individual. And yet he’d still found himself getting swept into the excitement of the Jonathan Fair chase.r />
  So he would savor his bit of celebrity—hidden as it might be under the moniker of “Tim Melbourne”—for just a moment or two. And he would do it internally.

  He couldn’t let Yorke see it.

  The stress of the Jonathan Fair capture—and the fact that it had been Yorke’s temporary partner and not herself who brought the man in—was written all over her face.

  The room was small with white walls, a flickering panel of fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and a plain cement floor. Fair had his arms crossed on the table. His hands were unrestrained, as Dale had thought it was more than safe to remove the guy’s handcuffs. Jonathan Fair wasn’t a threat.

  More importantly, neither was Felix Lyons.

  “Are we speaking with Felix right now?” Dale said.

  Fair gave him a confused look. “Naturally.”

  Yorke leaned toward him. “May we speak to Jonathan?”

  “Who?”

  “Jonathan. The other man in your head.”

  Fair looked over at Dale and then back to Yorke. “Are you mad, woman?”

  Yorke bristled.

  Dale cut in before Yorke could respond, speaking in a calm, even voice. “Felix, we understand you were working with Lee Kimble. How did you two know each other?”

  “I know no one of that name,” Fair said. His voice was very proper, formal, old-fashioned. “The man who was assisting me went by Jones.”

  “First name?” Yorke said.

  “He claimed it was Tom, but I believe he was being untruthful about that.”

  Dale looked at Yorke. “Tom Jones… Like the singer. What do you think of that?”

  “Coincidence…?”

  “Or mockery. We know Kimble’s been using Fair, so I’m guessing he’s been a jackass to him the whole time. We already saw him shouting at him.” He turned back to Fair. “How did your partnership with Tom Jones work?”