Floodgate

by Johnny Shaw

  I joined the other men. We spread the word of the truce. I got more bruises than sleep. We pulled people from fire and rubble. We brought water and food to the desperate. We fought. Punished looters and con men. Killed those who exploited the chaos. We brought the city back from the dead.

  It would be almost twenty years until I saw the girl again. I hadn’t even known her name until all those years later.

  Beth.

  1986

  CHAPTER 33

  Are you a complete ignoramus? How could I possibly have a good reason for such madness?

  —Statement of Nicholas Slosser after being asked why he stripped nude, painted his body silver, stole a helicopter, and landed it in the middle of Charbonneau Field during the fifth inning of an Auction City Terrapins home game (1980)

  The big Hawaiian screamed as the split hook of Pilar’s prosthetic arm pinched his hand tighter onto the detonator. With her free hand, she threw wild punches at the man’s face. He grabbed her hair and pulled her over the table, but she remained latched to him.

  “Get this Mexican off me!” Kahulamu yelled.

  “I told you. I’m Puerto Rican, mamabicho,” Pilar said.

  Mirna jumped the table and joined the fray. She got an arm around his neck and attempted to choke him out, but the man was huge. The line where his neck began and his shoulders started proved vague, his throat protected by thickness. Kahulamu didn’t look bothered by the woman around his neck, but Pilar was like a ferret on a finger. As hard as he shook, she wasn’t coming off.

  Rocco moved to line up a shot. With Mirna behind the man, he couldn’t risk it.

  “You should not have done that,” the big man said. “Pele is unforgiving.”

  Kahulamu reached for the device in front of him with his free hand.

  “No!” Andy shouted as he leapt forward to stop him. Too late.

  The good news was that they didn’t explode. The bad news was a loud and sustained beep sounded and a digital timer lit up in the center of the mass of wire and metal. The timer was set to three minutes. It counted down.

  “Damn it,” Kahulamu said. “I forgot I attached that timer.”

  “Shut it down,” Andy said.

  “Sorry for the delay.” The Hawaiian laughed. “You’re done, Venus de Mexico. If you let go, we explode. If you hold on, we explode. Only a few minutes later.”

  He said all that despite Pilar and Mirna hurling fists in his face. Kahulamu threw an elbow behind him that clipped Mirna in the temple. She tumbled to the ground.

  “Fuck that,” Mirna said. She stood up, pulled her gun, and shot Kahulamu in the head. No fanfare. His thick hair flew to the side, but it caught whatever escaped the inside of his skull. The matted hair dripped thick red. Kahulamu sagged but moved surprisingly little. His center of gravity already settled.

  “Two minutes, forty-five!” Andy yelled.

  “Everyone out,” Pilar said. “Get out.”

  “Unhook your arm,” Rocco said.

  “Not how this one works. I have to maintain the pressure,” she said. “It’s time to haul ass.”

  “I won’t,” Mirna said.

  “What good does that do?” Pilar yelled. “Go.”

  “Find some duct tape, some string, something to keep that detonator closed,” Andy said to Rocco and Mirna. “I’m going to disarm this son of a bitch.”

  “You don’t know how to do that,” Rocco said.

  “Just because I haven’t doesn’t mean I can’t. I was dealing with a similar device earlier this week,” Andy said. Although he remembered that he hadn’t been overly successful then, and it had been a television, not a bomb.

  “You can’t disarm a bomb based on a delusional belief in your abilities.”

  “Find something to keep that detonator closed, and we won’t have to find out,” Andy said. “We’re running out of time.”

  A minute later, they hadn’t found anything that would work. There weren’t many choices in the house. They tried the laundry, but it couldn’t get tight. Nor could Rocco’s belt or shoelaces. Some peeling duct tape had lost its stickiness. Pilar held on, her face red and sweating.

  Andy had opened the side of Kahulamu’s device and stared at the very complex system of wires. A good chunk of it made no sense to him.

  “Way more complicated than a television set,” Andy said.

  “What did you say?” Pilar said.

  “Nothing.”

  When the clock ticked past two minutes, a thimbleful of urine leaked from Andy’s body. So much for clean underwear in case of an accident.

  “It’s time for you two to go,” Andy said to Rocco and Mirna. They continued to search drawers and shelves, looking for anything helpful.

  Rocco threw a drawer across the room and kicked a wall. Mirna crossed her arms and shook her head.

  “Por favor, mi hermana,” Pilar said. “Someone has to protect the others.”

  Her wet eyes locked on Pilar, Mirna ran a finger along the scar on her face. Pilar nodded. Mirna walked out the front door.

  Rocco put a hand on Andy’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  “I can do this,” Andy said. “I know I can.”

  “It’s a losing bet.”

  “You can go, Destra,” Pilar said. “This isn’t on you. I’ll hold on until you’re clear.”

  “Come on,” Rocco said.

  “No,” Andy said. “Now quit wasting my time, and let me defuse this bomb.”

  “Then I guess I’m staying, too,” Rocco said. “Wouldn’t be much of a father if I didn’t have faith in my son.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Pilar said. “Both you estúpidos need to go.”

  Rocco and Andy looked at each other and smiled.

  “Like father, like son,” Andy said.

  Andy, Rocco, and Pilar laughed. Jokes didn’t have to be particularly funny when you were in a safe house with a bomb and a dead Hawaiian giant. They laughed because it was probably their last. The punch line a minute away.

  “I know you’re lying about knowing about this thing, but tell me you know what you’re doing,” Pilar said. “Even if you don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could do this,” Andy said. “I’m not suicidal.”

  “Don’t fuck this up,” she said. His new mantra. He could see her straining to hold her grip, the veins in her arms bulging from the effort. She did her part. Now it was time to do his.

  “You can do this,” Rocco said.

  Sweat ran off Andy’s forehead into his eyes. He blinked it away, wiped his face with his shirtsleeve.

  Multicolored wires ran from the timer into various parts of the mechanism. For all its seeming complexity, a bomb was a simple device: a trigger, a timer, a power supply, and initiator, and an explosive. He was looking for the power supply and the primary trigger system. With a pair of pliers he’d found on the table, he carefully pushed some wires out of the way. Within the maze, he found what he was looking for.

  In high school, Andy had gone through a phase where he sought out the books that nobody was supposed to read. The ones that you couldn’t get in bookstores, but some guy knew some other guy. Mail-order from back pages of leaflets. That reading list included books like The Anarchist Cookbook and The Militant’s Formulary, books with—among other things—detailed information about bomb making. He hoped he remembered the basics.

  Five colored wires ran from the primary power source. One of the wires would be coming from the timer, others going out to the trigger mechanism and the initiator. There could also be dummy wires. He needed to clip the one that distributed the trigger message to the rest of the mechanism, essentially the fuse. Ignore the timer and kill its brain.

  “How much time left?” Andy said, following each of the wires’ paths with his eyes.

  “Forty-eight seconds,” Pilar said, interrupting her recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish.

  “I understand what’s going on in here, but I’m still going to have to guess.”
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  “Get out of here,” Pilar said, resigned. “I appreciate the try.”

  “I didn’t say I gave up,” Andy said. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Uh,” Rocco said.

  “No way,” Pilar said. “Ain’t going to be on me if this thing goes.”

  “I’m going to clip the red wire.”

  “You had much luck with red wires in the past?” Rocco asked. “Seems like red is obvious. The one that everyone clips first. Like red cars get more speeding tickets.”

  “Which wire is the ugliest?” Pilar asked.

  Andy looked at the mechanism, never having really considered the relative beauty of a wire. “I suppose the gray one.”

  “Cut the gray one,” she said.

  “Timer?”

  “Twenty seconds,” Rocco said. “Cut the gray one.”

  Andy reached into the device with the wire cutters. He squeezed the wire cutters to clip the gray wire, but they slipped in his sweaty hands. With an audible snip, he accidentally cut the red wire.

  They didn’t explode.

  “The clock is still going,” Pilar said.

  “I wasn’t cutting the timer. It will still run down. It should hit zero and then nothing should happen.”

  “Should?”

  “Theoretically. But don’t let go,” Andy said. “That detonator is attached separately.”

  Andy, Rocco, and Pilar watched the clock as it counted down.

  “Do you want to hold my hand?” Andy asked Pilar.

  She shook her head.

  “Will you please hold my hand?” he asked her.

  She grinned, reached out, and grabbed Andy’s sweaty hand. Rocco put his hand on Andy’s shoulder. Nothing more to say.

  Five. Four. Three. Two.

  “I cut the red wire,” Andy blurted out.

  “You dick,” Pilar said.

  One.

  It took Andy and Rocco ten more minutes to find something to keep the detonator closed. Finally, Rocco caught sight of the shrink-wrap around the boxes of chili and Spam in the mudroom. They pulled it all off and cut it in strips. It took a while, but they got it wrapped tightly around the detonator, the prosthetic hook, and the dead man’s hand.

  “Sorry about having to leave your arm,” Rocco said.

  “No big deal. It’s like losing a pair of sunglasses,” Pilar said. “I got another one in the car.”

  Andy collected all the paperwork that Kahulamu had in front of him. Each of the pictures on the desk. Some scattered notes and scraps of paper. Whatever he could find.

  Five convicts down. Only Hopewell remained.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Pilar said, examining their slapdash effort on the detonator. “I don’t trust this thing one bit.”

  When the two of them reached the front door, Pilar turned to Andy. “Thanks. I don’t know if I would’ve stayed.” She gave him a hard punch on the arm and walked outside.

  Mirna, Agnes, and Hiro waited three blocks away. They sat on the curb, big smiles when they saw Andy, Rocco, and Pilar approaching. Mirna ran over and gave Pilar a bear hug, lifting her off the ground. Agnes kissed the palm of her hand and placed it on Pilar’s cheek.

  “What took you so long?” Hiro asked. “When it didn’t explode, we figured that was a good thing. But none of us were going to look down the barrel of that bazooka.”

  “Great job in there, son,” Rocco said, slapping him on the back.

  Maybe for Rocco and Andy it was bombs, not fishing trips. Sewer cannibals, not ball games. Lost time was lost, but Andy could see that their future was going to be an interesting one. That they were going to be in each other’s lives in their own weird way.

  “I grabbed all the Hawaiian’s stuff,” Andy said, holding up the fistful of papers. But nobody heard him.

  The house exploding drowned him out. A burst of fire and black smoke erupted from the roof. The windows and walls blew out onto the street, fire following. It was beautiful and then gone, bits of house drifting to the ground.

  Saran wrap was a great invention, but it wasn’t designed to hold a dead man’s hand and a prosthetic arm over a grip detonator. No fault to the product. That’s just a really specialized function.

  CHAPTER 34

  Why I want all my eggs in one basket? They all in one basket, I drop the basket, I ain’t got no eggs. And I like eggs. Better I keep them all over the damn place.

  —From the stage play Super Barrio Mothers, by Gilberto Moreno, which premiered at Auction City’s historic Cocteau Theatre (1986)

  A few minutes later, Kate pulled up in a van with the image of Red Sonja riding a surfboard and fighting a bear airbrushed on the side. Full Molly Hatchet–era Frazetta. Majestic.

  “I thought we weren’t using the Shaggin’ Wagon anymore,” Rocco said.

  “It’s a classic. Besides, it was the only vehicle left that wasn’t a stick,” she said, lifting the elbow of her arm in its sling.

  “Any word on Hopewell?” Rocco asked. “He’s the last convict we got to track down.”

  Kate shook her head. “But there’s good news on the ACPD front. Mac’s worked out a deal with Randall Ashley and the other cop brass. They were all scared of Gray, but Hank Robinson is just a bad Xerox of Gray to them. He’ll be done on the same day he got crowned.”

  “The other cops will switch that easy to Ashley?” Andy asked. “He’s got clout, but Robinson practically has his own militia.”

  “Ashley claims to have the majority of the brass and the rank and file. The loyalists will have to be convinced.”

  “They can talk politics all day, but Hank Robinson isn’t going away without a fight,” Andy said. “He’s got the Thorntons. And Hopewell is out there planning some mayhem. If Robinson gets pushed against the ropes, he’s going to swing wild.”

  They huddled around the bank of payphones. Andy never realized how much spare change was necessary to run a criminal operation. They needed to reach Macklin and the other leaders to coordinate their next move.

  “All I’m getting is the ‘This number is no longer in service’ message,” Kate said. “Tried three different numbers.”

  “The phone lines at the Fortress are independent. The whole network would have to be down,” Rocco said.

  “Mac is at the Fortress?” Andy asked.

  “It could be the riots. One of the fires impacting the lines,” Kate said.

  “Doubtful. Mostly underground,” Pilar said.

  “Who else is at the Fortress?” Andy cut in.

  “After the bombings, Mac insisted on bringing all the leaders there, including the new leader of Consolidated,” Kate said. “It’s the safest place in the city.”

  “Champ is there, too,” Andy said. “Does Robinson know about the Fortress?”

  “Gray did,” Rocco said. “So I have to assume that Robinson knows, as well.”

  Andy made a sound of frustration that sounded like whaaajaaavaaa. He looked up at the sky, took a deep breath, and said, “So, you’re telling me Robinson knows where all the leaders are congregated? Thus it could be concluded that Hopewell might know where they are, as well. The man that was hired to kill them all? And the phone is dead at that location?”

  “When you put it that way,” Kate said.

  “The phones didn’t just happen to go out. Hopewell is going to attack. If it hasn’t already begun.”

  “Then we—” Rocco said.

  “I’m not done,” Andy said. “You put pretty much the only person I care about there, too. Great job.”

  “We don’t know if—” Rocco said.

  “Sometimes I wonder how you people managed to maintain this thing for so long. How the city is still standing. Hell, you’ve done jackshit about the riots,” Andy said. “You seemed so nefarious at first, but it’s really a seat-of-your-pants, shit-for-brains kind of operation up close. It’s all facade. Professional talent with amateur brains.”

  “Now is not the time,” Rocco said.

  “Or maybe it’s ov
erconfidence. You’ve been at it so long that you haven’t faced an actual threat. So removed from the day-to-day that the delusion of invulnerability set in.”

  “Maybe you can write a scathing op-ed for the Intelligencer,” Rocco said. “Right now, we have to figure this out.”

  “A hobo revealed your secrets to me. A damn hobo. And now I’m going to take an ice cream truck to an ambush. It’s ridiculous. You people are frigging ridiculous.” Andy stomped toward the ice cream truck. He stopped and turned. “Well, are you all coming, or do I got to stop the bad guys from killing the other bad guys all by my damn self?”

  In movies the heroes showed up in the nick of time. In movies the heroes won. In movies there were such things as heroes. Movies were full of shit.

  Andy doubted there were any heroes in this scenario, but nick of time be damned. They were definitely late to the party.

  The first thing that Andy saw when the ice cream truck turned onto Holt Avenue was a Japanese man with a gigantic sword chasing a uniformed police officer down the street. Not the strangest thing he saw, just the first thing.

  Violence filled Holt Avenue. Three blocks of fighting men and women. Not a riot but a melee. This wasn’t a protest or an angry mob. These were soldiers in a combat zone. Andy heard a couple gunshots, mostly in the distance. The men and women fighting in front of him battled with bare hands and bludgeons, brawling in quarters too close for firearms, too much of a chance of shooting an ally. If not for the cracking bones and spraying blood, it looked as though the combatants were dancing. Dancing each other to death.

  It appeared to be everyone against the police. Either that or an attack on men with mustaches. Members of 893, Consolidated, and suited bodyguard types that Andy took for Trust stood toe-to-toe with uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives in short-sleeve shirts and ties. Nothing pretty. Nothing choreographed. Sloppy forearms to the ears, kicked shins, throat punching, and a whole lot of rolling on the ground.

  There were scattered bodies, too. Dead or unconscious. Most likely both. It was the most insane thing Andy had ever seen in Auction City, and he had just been chased through the sewers by mole people.