by Robert Ward
He heard screams, and as he got closer, he made out the words: “Mira! He’s got a gun!”
“Look out. Vámonos!”
Jack hit the edge of the park and watched as Rollins knocked people down and headed for the freeway.
The nighttime traffic was dense. He’d never get across the freeway. On the other hand, Jack couldn’t risk a shot if he somehow managed to get out there among the cars. He ran across the field, his own gun out, and headed for the sidelines.
As he came closer to the terrified crowd, he screamed: “Get down! FBI!”
The crowd on the sidelines dove for cover. Jack knelt, aimed, but there was still a group of people between himself and Rollins, who was now on the freeway curb.
Rollins turned now and saw him through the mob. He pushed a woman out of the way and fired at Jack. The bullet sizzled by his head.
On the ground near him, all hell broke loose, the parents terrified for their children. Some of them got up, ran out onto the soccer field, grabbed their kids, and started running in the opposite direction. Rollins fired again and hit a woman nearby. Jack saw her fall as if she had been hit by lightning. The crowd screamed again. There was no other choice. Jack had to take a shot of his own, before Rollins hit someone else.
He knelt by a picnic bench and then fired at Rollins’s right side.
The bullet hit him dead on and Jack saw a red spurt blow out of his ribs.
Jack fired again, and a red mist came from his left knee.
Rollins turned now and limped directly out into the freeway.
A huge moving van with the words starving students on it bore down on him. Rollins rolled out of the way, but was hit by a truck that said Ding Dong Ice Cream. His body flew up over its roof and was left out on the freeway.
Jack got up and began to run toward the freeway, his gun still out, ready to fire.
Standing on an adjacent corner, only a half block away, was a man with his digital video camera filming the whole sequence. A man with a beard and a scar under his eye. He had been following Jack and Oscar for three days, and now — spectacularly — he had his big payoff .
The film was going fine. Everyone was going to be very, very happy.
Even that worrywart Jim.
He knew that the other cops were going to come now, and that he was vulnerable standing here. So, time to book out. Time to get back and see how this great action sequence came out.
The cars drove slowly around Rollins, who lay in the passing lane. He was bleeding from his ribs. His leg and his right side looked smashed. Amazingly, though, he was conscious and seemed to be alert. His SIG Sauer was lying nearby on the ground and Jack kicked it away quickly.
Behind him he heard Oscar’s voice.
“I’ll take that.”
He put on plastic gloves and picked up the pistol.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I think.”
Jack got out his cell phone and punched in a code.
“Medic needed Serrano Park and the 110. Now. Several people shot. Hurry.”
As Oscar walked out and began to reroute the traffic, Jack walked over to the fallen Rollins.
“You’re hit bad, man,” he said.
Rollins looked dazed, obviously in shock.
“Think I’m gonna buy the farm?”
“I’ll tell you straight up, bro. It doesn’t look good. You got something to tell me — what you did at Wonderland Avenue the other night — get it off your chest?”
Rollins looked confused. He rubbed his broad blood-splattered forehead.
“Wonderland? How you know ’bout that?”
“Don’t matter how I know,” Jack said. “You ain’t got time to worry about that. Just tell me.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Rollins said.
“Cut the shit, Rollins. I know you were up there.”
Rollins spit out a gob of blood. Part of it hit Jack’s shoes. In the distance Jack could hear sirens wail. Rubberneckers drifted by staring at the fallen man, and one creep took a picture of him.
“I was up there,” Rollins said. “’Cause a guy called me ’bout a car for sale.”
“Yeah, right. What happened then?”
“I couldn’t find the address.”
Jack reached down and grabbed Rollins by the collar.
“Listen, Edward. You’re on your last legs, man. You gonna die with a man’s murder on your immortal soul? That what you want?”
“Murder?” Rollins said. “No way, my friend. I looked up and down the streets up there, couldn’t find the address, and went home. End of story.”
Jack looked into his eyes and shook his head.
“You didn’t cut a guy’s brakes so when he started his car going down the hill, he couldn’t stop?”
Rollins shook his head.
“Man, you whack,” he said. “I din’t do nothing like that.”
Jack felt a rage boiling through him. He wanted to smash Rollins’s face in, see how he told it after that.
But suddenly there was a woman med tech standing next to him.
“Sir, this man is wounded.”
“No shit,” Jack said. “Jack Harper, FBI.”
“Get out of the way, Agent Harper. You know better than to interrogate a wounded man.”
She pushed past Jack and began to attend to Rollins.
“You lying fuck,” Jack said. “I know you did it.”
The tech looked at him and shook her head in disbelief.
“You get out of here, Harper, before I write you up,” she said.
“Yeah,” Rollins said. “I might jest get me a civil suit outta this. Breaking and entering into my sister’s pad, shooting up the ’hood. You a menace, Harper. One of them Mark Fuhrman mutherfuckers.”
He laughed and spat up another gob of blood and aimed it at Jack. It hit the cuff of Jack’s pants as he turned and walked away.
12
BACK HOME, JACK REACHED into his fridge for a bottle of Rolling Rock. He popped the top, shut the door, and then sat wearily down at the kitchen table. His right leg ached, and his shoulder was bothering him. He shut his eyes but that didn’t help. He kept picturing Zac Blakely’s terrified face as he turned and smashed into the cafeteria wall.
He’d sacrificed his life to save the kids, and Jack was going to get the bastard who did it . . . he swore it to himself.
Then the phone rang. Jack reached over, took it off the hook.
“Hello.”
“Hello. Is this my friend Agent Harper?”
Jack felt the shock hit his chest.
“Who is this?”
“I’m sure you know.”
Jack let out a breath.
“Steinbach. How’d you get my number?”
There was a mocking laugh on the other end of the line.
“Well, you can hardly expect me to tell you that, Harper. Remember what I told you? My reach is long.”
“You call me at home again, asshole, and you’ll find out how long mine is.”
There was another laugh. It was clear Steinbach was enjoying this.
“So violent. So defensive. I just called to say that I was terribly sorry to hear about the death of your old partner and mentor, Zac Blakely. They just aren’t making cars the way they used to.”
Jack felt a wave of rage passing over him and struggled not to reveal it to Steinbach.
“You’re right, Karl, they’re not,” he said. “And they’re not making hit men the way they used to, either.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning your boy Eddie Rollins won’t be doing any more work for you anytime soon.”
There was a brief silence on the other end. Then:
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Jack. Eddie Rollins? I’ve never had the pleasure.”
“Yeah, right,” Jack said.
“No, really,” Steinbach said. “I merely called to commiserate with you. Yours is such a dangerous line of work. Why, anything can happen to a guardian of the pu
blic trust at any given time.”
Jack felt his jaw tense up. He wanted to reach through the phone and squeeze Steinbach’s Adam’s apple until it turned to pulp.
“Listen, you fat fuck, if anything . . . anything at all happens to either my partner or Hughes I’m going to come up there and take it out on you, personally. You hear me?”
There was another little chuckle from the South African’s end.
“Jack, Jack . . . Listen to you raving on. One would never know that you were an agent of reason and the law.”
“What would you know about the law or reason, Steinbach?”
“Quite a bit actually,” Steinbach said. “I passed the bar in 1989. Do you realize that in my home in Capetown, I was one of the few lawyers who stood up for repatriation?”
Jack wanted to hang up, but there was something irresistible about talking with Steinbach in this way.
“So what are you saying, Karl? You used to be a good guy?”
“Yes, Jack. I was very good. But the powers that be didn’t appreciate my idealism. They set me up for smuggling. Sent me away. I lost my wife, my son, my home . . .”
“So you had no choice but to become a scumbag, is that it?”
“None whatsoever. After my five years in jail, I got them all.
Every one of them who had sent me up. They paid for violating my honesty.”
“Bullshit!” Jack said. “You were always a germ, just waiting to infect somebody.”
Steinbach laughed again.
“You’re so simpleminded, Jack. Do you really believe there’s any difference between you and me?”
“All the difference in the world, Karl.”
He slammed the receiver down.
“That fuck!”
Julie appeared in the kitchen doorway. She looked shocked.
“Jack, is something wrong?”
“No,” Jack said. “Just a little mix-up at work. It’s cool.”
From the other room, Kevin called, “Will everybody chill out a little? I’m trying to watch Ghost in the Shell.”
Jack gritted his teeth. He wanted to talk to his son about skipping school, but he hadn’t had a moment.
“How’s Kev doing?” he said to Julie.
“Not so great,” she said. “He won’t talk about the school thing. But I talked to the principal today, and if he does it again, he could be thrown out. When I mentioned that to him, he got very defensive and wouldn’t talk to me at all.”
Jack sat down at the kitchen table.
Julie looked harried, worried.
“He said I wasn’t his mother and that I had no right to ask him anything. It’s so funny, Jack. When I first started going out with you, he seemed like any other kid. I had no idea how angry he was about your divorce.”
Jack nodded and tried to stroke Julie’s hair, but she pulled her head away.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“I think he needs a therapist, Jack. Could do him a world of good.”
Jack shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Because my ex and I went to therapy sessions for two years and all that happened is that we got angrier and angrier at one another. The therapist would say, ‘This room is a safe place to get out your feelings,’ so we did. Man, did we ever! But it turned out it wasn’t a good place for that at all. We couldn’t leave the stuff we’d said to one another in the room, and when we got home, things really got twisted. You know what I believe in now? You got bad feelings, you work harder, you get a girlfriend, you change your life. You don’t need to indulge them all the time.”
“Great,” Julie said. “Well, they’re coming out anyway, Jack. Maybe not at you. But at me. I spend the whole day teaching fifth graders, then I come home to a furious teenager and a boyfriend who gets home around two A.M. four nights a week. And where the hell were you all night?”
Jack laughed harshly.
“Oh, I was at a party. Yeah, at the Playboy Mansion. Me and Hef and the Bunnies. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Oscar almost got killed, and I ended up shooting a guy in the middle of the freeway. Yeah, you shoulda been there. It was a real gas.”
Julie shook her head and looked at the floor.
“I’m tired,” she said. “And tomorrow’s a long day. Good night, Jack.”
She got up and walked out of the kitchen toward the bedroom. Jack wanted to stop her, take her in his arms, but something held him back. The something that stopped him from going into the front room, switching off the tube, and dealing with his son.
He felt a mental and physical exhaustion, and he knew that he wouldn’t have the words to make things better.
He’d have to deal with it all tomorrow.
Christ . . . the list of things was endless.
And then, just as he had gotten up to head into the shower, the phone rang again.
If it was Steinbach, he was going to take his head off .
But it wasn’t. The phone said F. Feeney.
“Hello.”
“Hi, Agent Harper?”
“Yeah?” Jack said.
“I know it’s late and I’m sorry, but you said if I thought of anything else, I should call you.”
“That’s okay,” Jack said. “What’s up?”
“Well, I’ve thought about it and thought about it, and gone over it with Mr. Toodles, and we both agreed I should call you at once.”
“That right?” Jack said. “And what is this vital information, Fred.”
“Well, I’d forgotten this. Guess I didn’t think it was top-notch important but the thing is, there was another guy I saw wandering around the canyon the day before the agent got killed.”
“Really, you saw him in the mug-shot book at the office?”
“Noooo,” Fred Feeney said. “That’s the amazing thing. The person I saw wasn’t in the book. He was . . . He was an agent. A guy who was right in the next office while we were in there looking at pictures.”
Now Jack was fully awake.
“What? You sure, Fred?”
“Trust me,” Feeney said. “Fred and Toodles never forget faces. As in absolutely never, ever. I saw his door. I remember the man’s nameplate. Kind of gold. And he had movie stars’ pictures all over the walls. Trouble is, I’m not as good with names as I am with faces. I’ve asked Toodles, but he draws a blank, too.”
“Forrester? That ring a bell?”
“Yes, that’s it. Forrester. Supervising Agent William Forrester. Mr. Toodles and I were out for a walk and we saw him drive up to the turnaround, park his car, get out, and walk around. I didn’t think anything of it. Maybe you should ask him about it, hey?”
“Yeah, maybe I should,” Jack said. “You’ve done a good job, Fred. But I don’t want you mentioning this to anyone else. Except Toodles, of course.”
“Toodles should get some of the credit. Without him, I might never have seen him at all. Well, hope I’m helpful. I like being a secret agent, Jack.”
“You’re a hell of a good one,” Jack said. “Good night, Fred.”
“Good night, Agent Harper,” Feeney said.
From behind him there was a sharp bark. As if Special Agent Toodles was signing off , too.
Jack sat at the kitchen table, head in his hands.
Forrester up at the Blakely house? The night before?
What the hell was he up to?
Could it have been Forrester who cut the brakes? Using the Steinbach threat as a cover?
Was he up there, intending to break into Blakely’s, and trying to find the stolen bank loot?
Whatever it was, he had to keep his eye on both Steinbach and his boys and Forrester. And he wondered how long it would be before whoever the hell it was would be coming after him.
13
“WAIT UNTIL YOU SEE this, Jim,” he said.
“You really think so?” James said, sitting in the leather seat at the projection room they’d set up in the old bedroom at the back of the house.
; “Oh, yeah.” He switched off the lights. “I don’t think anyone is ready for this. Amazing stuff .”
He switched off the light and took the seat next to Jim. He was getting all nervous in his stomach, tingly in the arms, just like he’d felt up in the tree. Couldn’t decide if he was excited out of his mind or sickened by the whole thing.
Only one way to find out. He hit the remote, and the movie started on the screen in front of them.
There was Blakely in his green BMW heading down the hill.
There were the school buses and the kids down there.
There was a zoom in on Blakely’s face, at the exact moment he realized that his brakes had failed.
Pull back and see the larger view. The mother screaming, then close in on her face, a scream like something out of Potemkin.
Then back to Blakely, as he realized what his choices were.
Suddenly he hit the pause button, and the image froze right there on Blakely’s face.
Jim turned and looked at him, his face agitated.
“Why’d you stop it?”
“See, Zac Blakely has a choice here. He can either save the kids and their mothers, or he can hit the wall. He can think of himself, his career, his retirement party, which is coming up soon, his wife, a very beautiful woman, or he can hit the wall and die a hero.”
“Yes,” Jim said. “I see that. And he chose . . .”
“The wall,” he said. “That’s right. Funny about that, isn’t it? He chose the wall. And died a hero.”
“The hero,” Jim said. Then he laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh at all. There was a deep bitterness in it.
“Yeah, the big FBI hero,” he said.
“Let’s see how the hero looks when he hits the wall,” Jimmy said.
“Right,” he said.
Then he clicked the button again, and together they watched Zac Blakely turn into the Wonderland cafeteria wall.
They watched the car explode, the bricks flying through the air. Blakely launched through the windshield.
“Great shot!” Jim said. “Great goddamned shot!”
“Thanks,” the older man said. “I would have never gotten it all if you hadn’t shown me how to use the camera.”
They turned and looked at one another, fondly. A mutual- admiration society.
“Who do we hit for Act Two?” Jim said.