Had to step over a hedge to get a look. Dark. I used the scope and saw a bedroom. The bed was made. The room neat. A guest room maybe.
Moving further, I got to a window near the corner of the home. More darkness, and this time curtains. They weren’t fully closed. I looked through the crack and saw an open door and a cabinet. Couldn’t see to the side. I was about to pull back when I glanced at the floor.
A robot. A humanoid looking robot.
A toy.
A Transformer.
My mind started transforming then, clicking and snapping and putting things together.
The children were here.
But it was such an obvious place for them to be.
Maybe they’d only been here, recently.
Maybe they were expected.
One guy I could ask. He was inside the house.
I DECIDED TO smoke him out. Meaning wait until he came back outside for a smoke.
There was no hurry.
I went back to the oak tree and texted Ira. I’m going to wait.
Ira: For what?
Me: A cigarette.
Ira: ????
I flexed my left hand a few times. My pinkie was soldiering on, but marching at the end of the line. He was gassed and in pain. Needed to rest.
Later.
BACK TO THE side of the house, just off the French doors. For a few minutes I stared up at the stars and the moon. Smelled oak and sod and horses, and what horses leave behind.
Made out some of the constellations like Dad taught me to do.
There was old Scorpius the Scorpion. The stinger poised to strike. A fitting sign for the evening’s festivities. Orion the Hunter was nowhere to be found. The gods had placed him on the other side of the sky to protect him from a poisonous hit. I was always impressed by that as a kid. A little thing with a stinger could bring down the mightiest of men. The world was a dangerous place.
So as the commandment says, sting them before they sting you.
The click of a door. Out he came, backlit from inside the house. He took out a pack of cigs and drew one out.
Orion was most vulnerable when he was at peace, smoking his pipe.
HE ONLY HEARD my last two steps. His hands were occupied lighting his cig. It was too easy.
I clocked him with my right. Not enough to put him to sleep but enough to muddy his head. He went down and I dragged him away from the light and patted him down.
He had a butterfly knife in his right pocket. I took it out and threw it into the bushes.
I dragged him to one of the oak trees. When I got there he was starting to squirm.
So I laid a chokehold on him, the same kind Jimmy Short Hairs had used on me. It cut off his ability to talk. Or scream.
I was in control of his air.
“You want to die?” I whispered.
He tried to move his head to look at me. I didn’t let him.
“I’m going to ask you some questions. You get one chance to answer each one. If I don’t like an answer, I snap your neck.”
Tomás stilled.
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s me. One chance. Here’s the first question. Are the children in the house?”
I let go a little pressure.
“You nod yes or no,” I said.
Nothing.
“No answer is the wrong answer,” I said. “Last chance. Are they in there?”
He shook his head.
“Mayne in there?”
Shake.
“How many inside?”
Nothing.
“Don’t make this hard on me, Tommy. How many?”
He said I should go do something to myself.
But I was not going to kill him. I knew that. He didn’t. I wanted to be done with killing. I wanted to be on a beach. I wanted to be in the ocean. I wanted to be away from scum like this.
“Tomás?”
A woman’s voice.
“Are you out here?”
Not any woman.
Natalia Mayne.
THERE WAS ONE too many people out in this yard.
I released the punk’s throat.
Then I gave him a shot to the head with the night scope.
He went to sleep.
“What’s going on?” Natalia said.
I came around the oak. “Natalia,” I said. “It’s Mike.”
She stood there, a shadowy form, the light behind her, face dark.
I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe it was the way her body twitched. Or maybe it was just chemicals in my brain.
But I ran at her the exact moment she turned to run back in.
I caught up to her at the door, just before she slammed it.
“Get out,” she said, in a low voice.
“What’s wrong?” I grabbed her shoulders.
“Get out of here!” Whispered, desperate.
“Let me help.”
We were in the kitchen. A rich person’s kitchen. Low lights. Chopping block in the middle. Big mortar and pestle on the block.
“Please go,” she said.
The lights came on in full.
The guy holding the gun knew how to use it. He’d been trained.
His name was Davis, and he was an LAPD detective.
“STAND ASIDE,” DAVIS said.
“Don’t kill him,” Natalia said.
“It’s perfect,” Davis said.
I looked around for options.
There weren’t any.
“Can’t we just call the police?” Natalia said. “Say he broke in?”
“And find me here?” Davis said. “Step to the side, Natalia.”
For half a second I thought of grabbing her and using her as a shield. But I didn’t know enough to convince myself Davis wouldn’t shoot us both.
But I could stall. I put my hand on her back, keeping my eyes on Davis.
He got that look on his face. The kind that said he was going to shoot first and explain later.
FOUR THINGS HAPPENED at the same time.
Everything went dark.
Alarms screamed.
I dove toward the chopping block.
The gun blasted.
I WASN’T HIT.
I scuttled to the other side of the block, feeling my way. Heard the night scope, strapped around my shoulder, knock against the wood.
I put it to my eye. Got to my feet, crouching behind the block.
A ghostly, green Davis waved the gun around.
I grabbed the pestle out of the mortar.
Two steps.
I made guacamole out of his head.
THE ALARMS KEPT blaring.
Where was Natalia?
Looking around, I saw her. She was on the ground. Bleeding.
I knelt. She was hit in the left shoulder.
I pulled out my phone and called Ira.
“Get an ambulance!” I shouted.
“You all right?”
“Natalia’s been shot.”
“You secure?”
“I think so.”
“Hold on.”
The alarms stopped and lights came back on.
“How’s that?” Ira said.
“Good.”
“A security team will no doubt be coming.”
“Get the cops up here. One man’s—”
Tomás came flying at me.
With an ax.
THE BRAIN IS a strange thing. Do we control it? Does it control us? Some factor of both? Is there a deity pulling the strings or are we Darwinian tops, spinning at the behest of mutation and chance? Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary, calls the brain “that apparatus with which we think that we think.”
One thing you have to say about the slimy network of synapses in our skulls. It can multi-task. And it can work fast.
My own brain flashed a thought: Where did he get an ax?
At the same time it ordered an adrenaline boost.
And last, from the muscle memory section of my control center, came direction to the
legs to jump forward. Just like with that guy with the aluminum baseball bat.
Only this time it was a long-handled, double-bladed ax about to come down.
I DROVE MY shoulder into his gut.
His hands came down on my back.
I heard the blade hit the floor.
Using both my arms, I V-split his. The ax flew out of his reach.
From somewhere primal, Tomás brought up a last gasp, survival-instinct punch that caught me on the ear.
That hurts.
My scrambled brain kept working.
It told me to get the ax, stupid.
I really think I heard stupid.
Rolling with the hit, I did one complete turn and got my hands on the weapon.
In one second I was on my feet, ax ready.
Just as Tomás was picking up Davis’s gun.
YOU DON’T WANT to kill. You don’t want to maim. You are tired of blood. But you do want to live. And that life force overrides everything, puts your system into automatic, and when you’ve got an ax in your hands that weapon also takes on life, and that’s what the ax in my hand did as it plunged so far into Tomás’s chest that all that was left showing was two inches of the exposed blade.
I went to Natalia, who was now face down and groaning. Gently turned her to me. Her eyes were lolling in her head.
I picked her up and carried into the next room. Laid her on the sofa. Propped her head on one pillow. Stuck another pillow under her sweater and pressed against the wound.
And as if from a distant world, a child’s scream ghosted into the room.
I LEFT NATALIA and followed the scream.
Another came, I adjusted my route. Getting closer.
One more. Fear-filled, desperate.
At the end of a long, dark hall. A door.
A child cried out. “Help!”
I tried to open it. Locked.
“Sam?” I said.
A pause, then, “Help!”
“Stand away from the door, Sam.”
“Help!”
“Go stand on the other side of the room. Okay? Sam? Okay?”
“Okay.”
After a moment I turned my back to the door and gave it donkey kick with my right foot. Heard a crack, but the door stayed.
Another kick and the door flew open.
THE BOY WAS on the far side of a small bedroom. His arms were around a little girl. The girl was sucking her thumb. Her eyes were wide. The boy was protecting her.
“Help!” the boy screamed.
“I’ll help you, Sam.” I didn’t move toward him.
“What happened?” he said.
“It’s all right now,” I said. “You’re going to be okay, you and your sister.”
“I want my daddy,” he said, and then burst into tears.
“I’m a friend, Sam. I’m here to help you. Okay?”
“I want my daddy!”
“Will you let me help you?”
His sister put her head on his chest.
“I’m scared of you,” Sam said.
I did not move forward. I squatted to his eye level. “I’m a friend of your mother. It’s going to be all right now. I need you to be brave for me, Sam. Brave for your sister. Think you can do that?”
He thought about it. For two seconds.
Then his eyes looked past me, and he screamed once more.
INSTINCT.
I jumped like a frog, forward, at the same time turning around.
Natalia was in the doorway.
Holding the bloody ax.
She held it waist level, as if she couldn’t lift it higher.
She rocked on her feet then fell, unconscious, to the floor.
IT TOOK A solid week to untangle everything.
It took a child psychologist talking to the children. The cops talking to Ira. Me talking to the cops. The Feds talking to everybody.
And Natalia, broken and hospitalized, saying a few things herself.
She laid it all on Davis. Who was in a coma. They’d had an affair, yes, but he was the one who set everything up—from the killing of Juan Gomez, to the bomb in the church, to killing her brother, Danny. It was a plan to nail Mark David Mayne, get the kids, and then control the synthetic biological drug market that Danny was serving.
Yance Perry, the actor I found hanging in his house, got involved in the enterprise. He was like an Amway salesmen for the drug in the Hollywood crowd. When he demanded more of the action he got removed. And so did his lover, Dennis Bork, who got too close to finding out what was going on.
The bodies I’d left behind—from Jimmy Short Hairs to the Lucy Liu lookalike—they were not working for Mark David Mayne, but for Davis. Natalia claimed she had no knowledge of that part of it, but Agent Holly Samara of our own DEA said that was a crock. But she also said Natalia was one of the best liars she’d ever come across.
I could attest to that.
The LAPD wasn’t so happy to buy a story that concerned one of their own. But the Feds hammered them. Also, Ira—good, sweet, dangerous Ira—he had recorded everything that happened in the house, via my phone.
AGENT SAMARA GOT me in a room alone and told me I was the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. I had a clean slate. That never would have happened unless all the Fed stars had aligned just right for me.
“One thing I haven’t been able to figure,” I said.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“The bomb. The explosion that started this whole thing. What did blowing up the church have to do with any of this?”
“You’ve been thinking about that the whole time, haven’t you?”
“Back of my mind.”
“We think the plan was for Natalia to show up at the church, look for her kids, who’d been signed in by Gomez. At the same time, Davis wanted to get rid of Gomez.”
“Why?”
“Because Gomez found out what we found out. He was on the witness list for Mark David Mayne in the upcoming custody hearing. Gomez had no way of knowing Davis and Natalia were making whoopee, as my grandmother used to say.”
“A fine phrase.”
“We think what happened is Gomez himself planted the bomb and was going to take out the guy you chopped into kindling.” She looked at her notes.
“Tomás,” I said.
She nodded. “He went to the church for a meeting with Gomez and took him out.”
I shook my head. “I think the guy who took out Gomez is named Stratemeyer.”
“Who?”
“Someone I had the misfortune of meeting.” I held up my left hand. “He tried to get away with my pinkie.”
She leaned forward. “Who is this guy?”
“Was,” I said.
Her mouth opened a little. “My, oh my.”
I said nothing.
“I’m going to need a full report from you,” she said.
“Someday,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m tired of talking. I’m thinking of becoming a monk.”
“That,” she said, “would be a shame.”
“Why, Agent Samara …”
She cleared her throat. “Natalia claims she didn’t know about getting rid of Gomez. Frankly I believe her. I think the plan, as she understood it, was for her to claim her kids were missing, and for Davis to show up to investigate and pin it on Mayne. It was going to be another domino to make a case for custody against Mayne. Gomez was part of it, because he was the one who checks in the kids, and did that day. Only they were never there. Gomez just checked them in.”
“So why the bomb?”
“We think Gomez had a plan of his own. He was going to kill the messenger boy, this guy …”
“Stratemeyer.”
“Yeah, kill him and let the explosion cover it. Claim it was a drug hit. Gomez had been talking to one of the sisters out there, Beatrice I think her name is.”
“I know her.”
“You seem to know everybody.”
“I haven’t met Jus
tin Bieber yet.”
She smiled. “Gomez had been saying he was in fear for his life from these Santa Muerte scum who use explosions as intimidation. Even though Gomez was Santa Muerte himself.”
“Looks like you’ve got more unraveling to do,” I said.
“That’s what I do,” she said. “I got an A in unraveling.”
I nodded.
“Come back sometime,” she said, “when this blows over. I’ll give you a tour of the building. And buy you a drink.”
“Why, Agent Samara.”
She smiled again.
“There is one thing you can do for me,” I said.
THEY HAD NATALIA in the Metropolitan Detention Center on Alameda. Agent Samara cut through the red tape to get me a tele-visit right away. That meant me sitting in a room with a handset and monitor.
On the monitor was Natalia Mayne, prisoner with sunken eyes.
“Why do you even want to talk to me?” she said into her handset.
“I think I need to thank you,” I said.
She shook her head, confused.
“You’re the reason I’m alive, right?” I said. “I got beat up and dumped in Phoenix. You had to convince Davis to let me live, didn’t you?”
She closed her eyes, then covered them with her hand. Her shoulders started shaking.
“Jimmy Short Hairs was working for Davis, too,” I said. I didn’t even have to ask it as a question.
We sat in silence for a long time.
Finally I said, “Your life doesn’t have to be over.”
She looked at me through her monitor.
“A lot of people have done time,” I said, “and got their lives back. They’re still your kids. It won’t be easy. But it can be done. You just have to decide to do it. You have to have the guts to do it.”
“It’ll never happen,” she said. “He won’t let it.”
“Fight,” I said. “Remember my rules?”
She nodded.
“I have another one,” I said. “Always protect the children.”
She took a breath.
“They’re young,” I said. “But you’re their mother. Show everybody you can get better.”
After a pause, she said, “I wish … I wish I could have known you before.”
“Good luck, Natalia.”
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