Mary saw me sitting alone in the corner of the suite that we’d commandeered for Christmas Day, and she came over and planted a chaste kiss on my forehead. “Merry Christmas,” she said.
I smiled at her. “Merry Christmas.” I gave her a hug, kissed her on the cheek, and took the hand she offered me, walking back into the thick of the festivities, where Tommy was trying to teach Junior how to play Nintendo.
FIFTEEN
Business in the desert cities did not stop for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, and we took the opportunity to do a little spying on the enemy. Joe told us who the power brokers were and where they worked, and we spent the week walking into some of the newer and more exclusive office buildings, checking out the lairs of our adversaries.
None of the security guards stationed at the entrances to the banks or corporate offices saw us, and we walked easily past them, into the buildings, choosing doors at random, going in. Some were locked, of course, but others weren’t, and behind them we saw deals being made, bribes being offered and accepted. We saw secretaries having sex with bosses, saw an executive with a photo of his wife and daughter on his desk fellating a younger man.
Sometimes these people would jump up in shock and outrage and horror when we barged in.
Sometimes they did not see us at all, and we stood watching as though we were invisible.
None of the power brokers were ever in, though. They did take the week off, no doubt spending it with their families, and it was lucky for them that they did, because we always arrived armed, ready to take out whomever we could.
New Year’s Day was on a Saturday this year, and Philipe had Joe call Harrington on the Thursday prior and set up a meeting on the first. Harrington didn’t want to have it on that day, he wanted to stay home, watch the games, but Joe said it was then or never, and the businessman finally agreed.
Joe hung up the phone. “He asked me if I’d finally come to my senses and decided to resign,” he said. “I told him that’s what we’re going to talk about.”
“Good,” Philipe said, nodding. “Good. That gives us a full day for target practice.”
We spent Friday in the desert, shooting at cans.
All of us.
Even Tim.
Saturday, we awoke early, too restless and anxious to sleep. Part of it was because the specifics of what we intended to do were still hazy in our minds—Philipe might know exactly how we were going to take out the power brokers, but he hadn’t yet shared it with the rest of us and we were vague on the details.
That ended at breakfast.
Over McMuffins picked up by Joe, with the sounds of the Rose Parade coming from the TV, Philipe outlined precisely what each of us was to do in what he called “the operation.” The plan was simple and—because of who we were, because of what we were—foolproof.
Joe was scheduled to meet with Harrington and the others at Harrington’s office at eleven, but we were in front of the building by nine, sitting in our cars, watching, waiting. The first man, the one with the cigar, arrived around ten. They were all there by ten-thirty.
“He’s not coming,” Joe said at ten-fifty.
“Who?” Philipe asked.
“Jim. The Ignored guy who’s supposed to be the new mayor.”
“What do you expect? He has no say in any of this. He’s just a puppet.” Philipe opened the door, got out of the car, motioned for the terrorists in the other cars to do the same. They emerged carrying revolvers and shotguns and automatic rifles.
“All right,” Philipe said. “You know the plan. Let’s get in and get it done.”
“Wait a minute.” Joe cleared his throat.
“What?”
“I want Harrington. He’s mine.”
Philipe grinned. “You got it.” He looked around the assembled group. “Are we all ready?”
“No.” Mary, holding on to the trunk of our car, shook her head. She had driven over with us, riding in the backseat next to Joe. She’d spent the night with him.
Philipe turned to face her, annoyed. “What is it now?”
She looked pale. “I… I can’t do it. I can’t go through with it.”
“Bullshit,” Philipe said.
“No. Really.” She seemed as if she were about to throw up.
“You were in on Familyland—”
“I can’t do it, okay?”
Philipe looked at her, then nodded. “Okay.” He sighed. “Wait here with the cars.”
She smiled weakly. “You want me to drive the getaway vehicle?”
He looked at her, then grinned slightly. “If you can handle it.”
“Yes, boss.”
Once again, he looked over the group. “Anyone else want to bow out?” His gaze settled on me, moved to Tim, to James. We all shook our heads. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get these fuckers.”
We strode into the building. Don and Bill staked out the south stairway, Tommy and Tim the north. Paul and John stayed in the lobby, in front of the elevators. The rest of us went up.
I held tightly to my automatic rifle and stared at the ascending numbers lighting up sequentially above the elevator door. My hands were sweaty and felt slippery on the gunmetal.
How had I gotten into this? I thought. How had this happened? I felt in my gut that I was doing what needed to be done—it seemed like the right thing to me—but at the same time I could not help thinking that something here was way off base. This was not supposed to feel right to me; I should not want to kill these men.
But I did.
I started thinking about all the ways in which I and the others were average, ordinary. Did average, ordinary individuals want to go around killing people?
Maybe they did.
I thought again that something had slipped off track somewhere along the line.
Then the elevator doors opened and we were on the fifth floor. Most of the lights were off. Only a few soft recessed fluorescent bulbs illuminated the long hallway. We walked slowly toward the office, our weapons at the ready.
“Harrington’s mine,” Joe repeated.
Philipe nodded.
We moved into the darkened waiting room, and the door into the inner office opened slowly.
“You go in first,” Philipe whispered. “Tuck your gun in your belt. Hide it.”
Joe turned toward us, scared. “You’re not going to leave me alone?”
“No. I just want to hear what they have to say.”
Joe nodded.
“Mayor Horth!” called out someone inside the office.
“Go!” Philipe whispered.
The rest of us gathered around the door, hiding in the shadows. Harrington stood as Joe entered the room. He looked large and threatening, silhouetted against the panoramic desert view, and when he spoke his voice was tight, tense, filled with a barely contained rage. “You little shit,” he said.
“What?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, ruining our New Year’s like this? You think you can pull this crap without us teaching you a lesson? I don’t know what got into your pea-brain, but you’ve obviously forgotten who you are and who we are and who calls the shots around here.”
“He calls the shots around here. He’s the mayor.” Philipe stepped out of the shadows into the room, revolver drawn. The rest of us fell into step behind him.
All of the men in the room looked from Joe to the rest of us. “Who are these guys?” the bald man asked.
Cigar squinted, looked closely at me, at Steve, at Junior, at Pete. “It’s more of them,” he said. “A whole gang of them.”
“‘Them’?” Philipe said mockingly.
“You’re certainly not one of us.”
“Then what are we?”
“You tell me.”
“We’re Terrorists for the Common Man.”
Cigar laughed. “And what the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we’re going to blow you away, you egocentric asshole.”
Philipe raised his gun and fired.
Cigar went down screaming, blood gushing from the hole blown in his chest. For a brief fraction of a second, I saw what looked like a light-colored organ or piece of tissue through the ragged opening, then the blood was everywhere, pumping out in a sickening, amazing geyser. Cigar began thrashing crazily on the floor, blood spurting all over the carpet, all over the pants and shoes of his panicked, terrified buddies.
“Take ’em out,” Philipe said coldly.
And we began shooting.
I aimed for the bald man. He was scrambling across the boardroom, trying to get away, and it was as though I was at a shooting gallery. I watched him move jerkily back and forth across the width of the room, like a target on a track, and I trained my automatic rifle on him, followed him for a few seconds, and shot. The first bullet hit him in the arm, the second in the side, and then he was on the floor and howling with agony, and I took a sight on his head and pulled the trigger and blood and brains shot out of his collapsing skull and then he was still.
I didn’t want to feel good, but I did. I felt great. I glanced to the right of the bald man, saw the short guy rolling on the floor, holding his leg and screaming, begging for his life in high womanly tones. Red streaks smeared over the white shag where his blood soaked into the carpet. Pete stood above him, a rifle pointed at his head.
“No!” he screamed crazily. “No! No! No! No!—”
Pete pulled the trigger and the short guy’s head exploded in a spray of red-and-white mist.
I was still high, still pumped, and I looked around for someone else to shoot, but the others had gotten them all.
Joe fired his last bullet into Harrington’s already unmoving body.
There was silence all of a sudden.
After the screams, after the shots, the quiet seemed spookily unreal. There was a muffled ringing in my ears. The air was filled with smoke, the floor with blood, and the room smelled of metal and cordite, fire and shit.
As quickly as it had come, the elation fled, replaced by repulsion and horror. What had we done? I caught James’ eye. The expression on his face was a mirror image of the one that must have been on my own.
“Let’s go,” Philipe said quickly. “Let’s get out of here. Now.”
Joe looked around the blood-spattered office. “But shouldn’t we—?”
“Now!”
He strode through the doors the way we had come. I followed immediately behind him, my stomach churning.
I made it all the way to the hallway before I puked.
SIXTEEN
The murders were news. Big news. They were the top story on the front page of USA Today, on the NBC, CBS, and ABC national newscasts, in The Wall Street Journal.
The men we’d killed had not only been important residents of Desert Palms, they’d been big deals in the world of business, and their deaths caused the stock markets of Tokyo and Wall Street to dip for a few days before turning back up. It turned out that Cigar, whose real name was Marcus Lambert, had not only owned Lambert Industries, the major tool manufacturing firm in the United States, but had been the major stockholder in literally dozens of multinational corporations. The others had not been quite as powerful, but their deaths as well caused a ripple effect in the world financial markets.
We cut out articles and videotaped newscasts and added to our library of media coverage.
Joe was like a new man. The whipped dog we had met that first night at La Amor had been replaced by a cocky bantam rooster. In a lot of ways, I liked the old Joe better, and I knew most of the other terrorists felt the same way. He’d been timid and frightened, but he’d been kind and generous and humble. Now he seemed overconfident, cocksure, and self-important, and there was a hardness within him that made a lot of us uncomfortable.
The day after “the action,” Joe convened a meeting of the city council, and he asked publicly for the resignation of the city manager and the chairman of the planning commission. He called for a vote on several ordinances that he’d been told to support in the past, and he voted against them.
We sat in the audience and watched. Philipe was paying particularly close attention to the proceedings, and he frowned to himself each time the mayor spoke. Finally, after Joe had broken a tie vote on widening a three-block section of road, I tapped Philipe on the shoulder. “What is it?” I asked.
“I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong.”
I followed his gaze, watched Joe lead a discussion on neighborhood watch programs. “What do you mean?”
“They hear him: they pay attention to him.” He looked at me, gestured around the room. “Not just the city council, but the reporters, the people who came to watch. They see him.”
I’d noticed that, too.
“And he’s changed. I mean, he’s killed his boss—with a little help from us—but he hasn’t…” Philipe shook his head, trying to find the right words. “He’s drifted farther away from us instead of coming closer. He’s… I can’t explain it, but I know it. I know what happens after the initiation, and it hasn’t happened to Joe.”
“You know what I think?” Junior said.
“What?”
“I think he’s half-and-half.”
Philipe was silent.
Bill jumped in, nodding excitedly. “Yeah. It’s like his dad was Ignored and his mom wasn’t. Like Mr. Spock or something.”
Philipe nodded slowly. “Half-and-half,” he said. “I can see it. It would explain a lot.”
I cleared my throat. “Do you think we can trust him? I mean, do you think he’ll remember where he came from or do you think he’ll just shine us on? Do you think he’s still on our side?”
“He’d better be,” Philipe said.
“And if he isn’t?”
“We’ll take him out. And we’ll put Jim in his place. Just like the money men originally planned.”
Three days later, Jim showed up at the mayor’s office. He was not only cowed and humbled but frightened, and we had a hard time convincing him that we did not blame him for anything.
He had called Philipe to ask for the meeting, had called from a pay phone because he thought we were going to track him down and kill him for his affiliation with Harrington and Lambert and the power elite. He wanted a truce, he said. He wanted to meet with us, get things straightened out.
There was no truce to be called, nothing to be straightened out, but Philipe agreed to meet with him, and set the time and place.
“Don’t tell Joe,” he told me as he hung up the phone.
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because.”
When Jim stepped into the mayor’s office the next morning at the appointed time, he looked bad. He’d obviously been living hand-to-mouth, and he’d obviously been under a lot of strain. His clothes were dirty, his face gaunt. He smelled as though he hadn’t bathed in quite some time.
Philipe told him about the terrorists, explained what we did and who we were. He put no pressure on Jim, but he made it clear that Jim was free to join us if he so desired.
It was then that Joe walked into the room.
The mayor stood in the doorway for a moment, stunned and unmoving. Then he rushed forward, his face crimson with anger. “Get the hell out of my office!” he demanded, pointing toward the door. “Get the hell out of my city!”
“This is Jim,” Philipe said conversationally. “Our newest terrorist.”
Joe looked from Philipe to Jim and back again. “Do you know who that is?”
“I just told you. He’s the newest Terrorist for the Common Man.”
“That’s the son of a bitch Harrington was going to put in my place!” The mayor moved in front of Jim, faced him. “Who are you and where are you from?”
“My name’s Jim Caldwell. I’m from San Francisco.”
“Why were you going to sell us out?”
“I wasn’t going to sell you out. Those guys found me working in a gas
station and asked me if I wanted to be mayor. What was I supposed to say?”
“Don’t be so hard on him,” I said. “You know how it is.”
“I know how it is? I know he was going to take over my job!” He confronted the new man. “Why did you come here?”
“I had to leave San Francisco because I killed my supervisor in the plant where—”
Philipe held up a tired hand. “Save it. We know the story.”
“I want him out of here!” Joe roared.
“I don’t give a fuck what you want.” Philipe’s voice was low and cold, the way it had been when he’d spoken to Harrington. He fixed the mayor with a steely stare.
Joe backed off a little, but his tone was no less belligerent. “I’mmayor here,” he said. “Not you.”
“That’s right,” Philipe said, moving slowly toward him. “You’re mayor here. You’re mayor of this shitty little Palm Springs suburb and you have the power to widen streets and build baseball diamonds.” He brought his hand down flat on the top of the desk. The slap sounded like a bullwhip. “Don’t try to tell me who the fuck you are. You’d be nothing if we hadn’t taken up your cause.” He pointed to Jim. “You’d be him!”
“I thank you for what you’ve done. But I’m afraid this is my town. I’m mayor—”
“Yes. You’re mayor. You’re not king.”
“I want you all out of my office.”
Philipe stood for a moment, shook his head slowly, then reached into his pocket and withdrew his revolver. “I knew it would come to this. You’re so fucking predictable.”
Now there was a quaver in Joe’s voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I glanced toward Tim, toward James. None of us knew where this was going. My mouth felt dry.
“Jim’s mayor here now,” Philipe said. He calmly checked the chambers of the gun. “How do you like that? I’m not even going to bother making you resign or sign a piece of paper. I’m just going to remove you from office and replace you.”
“You can’t do that! The people elected me!”
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