by Dick Stivers
“Please don’t talk.”
“Who wants to talk?” Her legs circled him. She locked her ankles behind him. He smelled the fragrance of her hair. The bed began to squeak and rock. Once again he started to slam into her.
Laughing, she responded to his violence with slow, sensuous writhing of her hips. But after a minute of his body slamming her, she whispered, “Easy. Easy. Slow down. Easy.”
He continued slamming her. She told him, “Stop it. Slow down, you’re hurting me.”
Grabbing her hips in his hands, he continued, not seeking to give or gain but only desperately wanting unconsciousness.
Flor defended herself. Grasping his head in both hands, she pressed her sharp thumbnails against his closed eyes. She put only slight pressure against the eyelids as she warned him, “Stop now!”
Lyons threw himself aside, twisting his face away from the knives of her thumbnails, reflexively straightarming Flor away to a safe distance. His breath came in gasps as he leaned against the headboard.
A siren screamed from the highway, the sound rising and falling, coming closer. The years of service with the LAPD left him with the habit of listening for the identity of the vehicle. Only an ambulance, surely, taking an accident casualty to the hospital?
Or maybe a sheriff’s black-and-white racing to the rescue of a fellow officer? Did an officer at this moment, at this precise moment, hold his guts with one hand while he radioed for help? If Lyons had a scanner he would know. Maybe he could help somehow…
“What’s wrong? What’s going on with you?” Flor said. “One minute you’re a lover and the next, you’re… you’re berserk.”
“Nothing. I just got too rough. I’m sorry.”
“No, Carl. I don’t mean just now. I mean all night. This afternoon. You’re here, then you’re not. You’re someplace else. You see things. Your face goes hard, like you’re ready to attack something. Someone.”
“Me? Do that?” He forced a laugh.
“Sometimes you are a scary guy.”
Lyons laughed at the understatement. His Able Team partners — Rosario Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz — also thought of him as a scary guy. “You are five different kinds of scary, scary dude” to quote both Gadgets and the founder of Able Team, Mack Bolan.
“I am,” he finally told her, laughing as if he joked. “I am a very scary guy. I even scare myself.”
“You may be, but you’re a decent man first. A good man. You’re easy to like. I liked you before I even really met you. I ever tell you that?”
“What? You don’t know anything about me. Not what I do, not who I am or was…”
“Yes, I do. That time in Bolivia. When the Justice Department wanted me to help create an identity for your team. I read your file. And your partners’ files. And I wouldn’t have you three anywhere near me until I knew everything I could. Simple little things like information and common sense keep me alive. I read and reread your file. In fact, I knew all about you before you even saw me.”
“Is that why you came on to me on the yacht? I mean, that was out of the blue.”
“Why? I thought you’d be a good risk for an affair. And it worked out.”
Lyons laughed. “I feel like a mail-order bride. Dude by dossier. You must have good recommendations. Why’d they let you in on all that information?”
“Why not? I needed to judge your character. Your commander recognized that.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“What?”
“The operations. The missions. What did you think?”
“I didn’t get that. I only got your personal files. Nothing about…”
“Oh. Then you don’t know.”
“I can guess. Don’t forget the time in Miami with your Colonel Phoenix and that Cuban Romeo.”
“I heard about it,” Lyons nodded. “All you did was drive the car…”
“What? They said that? I just drove the car? I had to kill two men in Miami, before we even went to the camp. So I just drove the car? That’s like saying the kamikaze just flew the plane.”
“I’m joking.” Lyons rolled in the bed and held her. “They told me all about it. Very extreme.”
“Was it?”
“You tell me. You were there. I only heard the stories.”
“I mean, was that mission extreme? Or is that what you do all the time?”
Lyons sat up again. He reached out for one of the beers beside the bed. He twisted off the cap and gulped. Foam ran down his face and into his chest hair.
Flor’s hand massaged the cold foam over his chest and shoulder. Her fingers traced the rope-like scar where a 7.62 NATO slug had touched his side, breaking ribs and making him cough blood for weeks. Her fingers found other scars where fire or knives or shrapnel had marked his body.
“You don’t get scars like these working in an office.”
“I used to be a cop. They’d dispatch us to break up a family fight, and the family would call a truce long enough to beat us half to death.”
“This scar on your arm is new.” She touched his left arm where the scabs and discoloration had finally disappeared after months of healing. A crescent-moon scar remained from a wound caused, absurd as it seemed, by a rearview mirror thrown by the impact of a machine-gun slug. The mirror had almost broken his arm.
She traced the new-moon welt with a finger. “Where’d you get it?”
“Playing football on the beach. I fell and…”
“Bullshit.”
“Really, I fell down on…”
“A cookie cutter, which just happened to be there.”
“Nah, an attack-trained clam. Fell on it and woke it up. Snap!”
“Carl, you joke and you laugh. But it isn’t funny to see you. You’re haunted. It’s like you’ve got different people moving around inside you. What’s happened to you? What have they got you doing?”
“You don’t have clearance.” He gulped down the last of the beer, twisted the cap off another.
“Are the three of you, the two other men and you, and the others I met — are you a hit unit?”
“You don’t have clearance.”
“Are you an assassin?”
Lyons did not answer.
Flor pressed her question. “I do have clearance. The phone call came through last week. I’m detaching from the Drug Enforcement Agency. I’m staying on the agency payroll but I’ll be answering to both the agency and your Stony Man. They call me an Interface Operative now. Drugs and terrorism…”
“Oh, God, no…” Lyons groaned. He left the bed, paced the motel room. “Why’d he do this?”
“Who? Who’s he? I got the call from the Justice Department.”
“Phoenix.”
“The colonel?”
“I’ll tell you this, without clearance and without ‘highest authority.’ When you get your check, buy whatever you want. Listen to me. Don’t put any money in the bank. Don’t buy life insurance. Buy the best clothes, the best shoes. Buy anything that’ll give you a laugh.”
“It’s dangerous. Is that what you’re telling me? So you think it’s so safe, what I’ve done? Pretending to be an international dope gangster? Do you want to protect me? You think I will die?”
“Getting killed ain’t it…” Lyons pointed to his right eye. “It’s what you see. After that, dying, thinking about dying isn’t the same. You recognize the advantages of being dead. No memories. No thinking…”
“Where have they sent you? What have you done?”
“You really got clearance? That the truth?”
“They want me to fly back with you. After your demonstration at the academy.”
Lyons stood naked in the darkness. He looked around at the walls and furniture, the infinite number of small hiding places for microphones and minitransmitters. He glanced at Flor’s purse and folded clothing.
He had rented the room at random. No one — not Flor, not even he himself — knew they would stay in the Malibu motel. With an afternoon a
nd night to spend together before his demonstration of the Atchisson assault shotgun at the LAPD Academy firing range the next day, he had driven north on the Pacific Coast Highway. He saw the motel sign and stopped. Totally on a whim. Still, he took no chances…
As he put on a sweat shirt and swimming trunks, he motioned for Flor to dress. “How about a walk on the beach?”
“You won’t talk in here?”
Lyons shook his head.
On the beach, walking arm in arm on the cold sand, he told her of his work in the past year. He talked until sunrise.
Flor listened to all the horror and inhumanity and suffering.
“What do you think?” Lyons concluded. “Is that what you want to do with your life?”
“Those people in New York, in the Amazon, in Guatemala, those Salvadorans — all of them, they’re alive because of you. You and Blancanales and Gadgets, right?”
“Yeah, I think about that a lot. That’s what makes it all worth it.”
“Do you think it would be any different for me? I’ve seen what you’ve seen, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Now I can. What greater opportunity could I hope for?”
“The terrorists — there’s always more. We kill one, a hundred come. We kill the hundred, the Soviets only open more training camps. There’s no end to the killing and suffering.”
” And what if we didn’t fight?”
“Take a tour of Cambodia. That could be America. And the Soviets would put Pol Pot in charge of American reeducation.”
“Then we fight…”
Lyons nodded. He put his arms around Flor and held her, the rise and fall of her chest soft against his muscles. He tasted the sweat-salt in her hair as the offshore wind blew strands of it over his face. He closed his eyes to the graying Pacific, the red-streaked skyline of mountains and beachfront homes. He wished he knew the future. But he did not, could not, and would not want to know when the bullet or knife or blastflash would end him.
When he died, he died. But now, in this moment of life and pleasure on Malibu Beach, he held the woman he loved. He thought of nothing but love.
3
Three hours later, at the firing range of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Academy in Elysian Park, Lyons paced the walkways. No one had appeared for his demonstration of the Atchisson selective-fire assault shotgun. The firing range remained deserted at nine-thirty in the morning. No academy cadets, no police officers used the range. At nine o’clock, the scheduled time for the demonstration, only Lyons and Flor stood at the long counter running the length of the facility. Now, after they had waited a half hour, none of the invited officers or security personnel had appeared.
Only the steady pop-pop-pop of a Heckler & Koch PSP 9mm pistol broke the silence. With one hand, then the other, Flor put groups of slugs through the black of a fifty-foot target as fast as she could pull the trigger.
Lyons looked back, saw the young woman rehearsing magazine changes with her right and then her left hand.
Struggling with the awkward position of the magazine release on the butt, Flor attempted to somehow release and eject the empty magazine while holding the next magazine in her off hand. Every time, the hand that held the full mag blocked the drop of the spent magazine. Finally she returned the high-tech German autopistol to its shipping box.
The booming of full-powered cartridges reaffirmed her faith in the downscaled Browning design of the Detonics .45 she always carried. Gripping the small pistol in both hands, she rapid-fired six rounds at the fifty-foot target.
Six .45-caliber slugs scored on the target. As she changed magazines, she called out to Lyons, “Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. The wrong day on the announcement. Perhaps that.”
“I typed the announcements myself. I had friends call me long distance to say they’d show up. This is much too weird. At least there should be guys here doing their monthly qualifying. I’m going to call some people.”
Jogging down the brick-walled drive, he glanced across the fountain plaza to the city-operated restaurant. In Lyons’s years of city service, police and maintenance personnel had crowded the cafeteria for breakfast. Not today. Only one Mechanical Department truck parked at the curb. He went to the guard post manned by an academy cadet.
“What’s going on?” Lyons asked him. “Someone declare today a holiday?”
The young Chicano woman looked at him oddly. “Everyone’s out there. Looking for them.”
“What? Who’re they looking for? What’s happened?”
“You don’t have a television? You don’t read the papers?” She turned over a newspaper on her desk. Lyons read the bold headline:
NIGHT OF HORROR
Mass Slayings, Gang Atrocities
Flor stayed at the wheel of their rented car while Lyons went to the pay phone near the entry of Parker Center, the main administrative offices for the Los Angeles Police Department. He dialed the number of a longtime friend and partner.
“Detective Towers,” a voice answered.
“Hey, Bill. It’s a crazy Federal you know.”
“You hotshots don’t waste any time. Who called you?”
“No one. Remember the demonstration? At the academy…”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Forgot all about it. This shit, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I bought a newspaper. Shit is right. Very bad shit. What’s the story?”
“This an official call or what? If it isn’t, the policy is that I can’t talk to you.”
“I’m officially calling as a concerned citizen. From the pay phone outside the front door.”
“I’m sorry, but the department cannot comment on this case to any civilians or outside law-enforcement agency. If you are patient, I’m sure the newspapers will carry every detail of the investigation, arrest and eventual acquittal of all the low-life scum punks involved. Three minutes, okay?”
“I thought you could fill me in.”
“Absolutely not, sir. Goodbye.”
Lyons waited at the steps until Bill Towers walked from the building. Without greeting his friend, Lyons rushed to the street. Lyons motioned with his right hand as he watched the traffic for the rental car. Flor turned the corner. Lyons looked to his right. Towers hurried away.
“You talk to your friend?” Flor asked as Lyons got in.
“Don’t take off just yet. Let him make some distance.”
“He’s up there?”
“In the checkered sports coat.”
Flor laughed. “That coat! Where do cops get their clothes?”
“He’s got kids in college. He thinks they’re more important than how he looks. Go. He’ll be waiting around the corner.”
Accelerating into traffic, Flor braked at a crosswalk. City workers crossed the street. Several read newspapers with headlines that screamed:
NIGHT OF HORROR
GANG TERROR
RACIAL OVERTONES TO CRIMES
A group of professionals argued among themselves, the voices of the well-dressed and immaculately groomed managers and attorneys loud even in the noise of the cars and trucks.
“This will unleash the worst police repression since the sixties…”
“The department will just dress the Triple K in blue and send them out to kill everything that isn’t white…”
Music blasted away the traffic noise. Three teenagers in sneakers and torn jeans and identical black nylon jackets — despite the midmorning heat — wove into the crowd. One of the punks carried an expensive “ghetto blaster.” The professionals looked up to see the ghetto punks.
The argument stopped. The professionals quietly scattered. The punks looked around at the fearful people and laughed. The light changed to green. Ignoring the crosswalk’s signal, the punks strolled in front of the waiting cars. When cars attempted to proceed, one punk pointed a pistol-finger at the drivers. The cars stopped. The punks bebopped in front of Flor and Lyons.
One punk saw Flor. He stared at the beautiful young Hispanic woman sitting with t
he Anglo man. He grinned, showing all his yellow and broken teeth. Stroking the crotch of his filthy blue jeans, he swaggered up to Flor’s window. “Hey, baby. Wanna get high with a cool brother…”
Flor jammed the muzzle of her Detonics .45 into the punk’s mouth.
Spitting teeth and blood, the punk staggered backward into slow-moving traffic. A truck’s fender hit him, bounced him into the car waiting behind Flor and Lyons. The truck did not stop.
Accelerating away, Flor laughed. Lyons returned his Colt Python to his shoulder holster and looked back.
The punk crawled on the asphalt, screaming and cursing, blood spraying from his lips. No one stopped to help him. His friends stood on the curb while traffic swerved around him without slowing.
Turning right, Flor stopped in front of Detective Towers. The middle-aged policeman with twenty years of worry lining his face glanced around at the people on the sidewalk before swinging open the back door. In a second, they merged with traffic again.
When he saw Flor, Towers blinked. He studied her for a moment before asking Lyons, “Who is your assistant?”
“My name is Flor. Carl, wipe this off.” She passed the Detonics to Lyons. He turned and grinned to his old friend.
“Should have seen what just happened!” Lyons used a rental-company brochure to wipe saliva from the muzzle of the autopistol. “This punk thought he’d abuse the pretty lady. Turned out he got a forty-five in the mouth.”
“You shot someone? On the street there?” Towers looked back.
“No shooting.” Lyons used his thumbnail to scrape a bit of flesh out of the hairline space between the Detonics’s slide and the frame. “Just low-velocity steel.”
Towers laughed. He ran his hand through his thinning hair and reached inside his coat for his cigarettes. He tapped one out of the pack. He counted the cigarettes remaining and then put the cigarette back.