The Death and Life of Bobby Z

by Don Winslow

  “How do I know?” One Way asks rhetorically, because the rubber-products salesman from Kyoto is too shocked to ask anything. “Well might you ask and well might I answer!”

  One Way leans in and whispers with foul breath into the man’s ear, “Many years ago when just a young sailor, I was second mate aboard a sloop that plied the wilder reaches of the southern sea. Cargo we had on board this otherwise sheer pleasure craft, I do confess it, cargo that would have gained the unfavorable attention of government officials if ever stopped and searched in port or open water—not to mention pirates, my friend, pirates—”

  A desperate tour guide tries to head One Way off because he’s leading the group the wrong way.

  But he’s pleased to have an additional audience and just says to the guide, “Hello, I was just telling my friend here about how I came to actually speak to Bobby Z. I knew him, you know.”

  “No, no, no, no …”

  “ ’Twas on the good ship Something-or-Other and I was sitting on the deck one soft silky night splicing a line, my hands busy and my lips around a roach of the sweetest Hawaiian boo, when I am joined by a man whom you would otherwise think was just a youth except that he had even then the bearing of a king.

  “You’re ahead of me, I see. Yes, Bobby Z it was, and he sat down beside me, a humble sailor I, and we said words to each other as we watched the stars sparkle on the phosphorescent water. We spoke as men. I was deeply moved.

  “The next day we sailed to an uncharted island …”

  One Way stops not only because the tour guide is yelling for help and the Japanese tourists are stacking up like cordwood at the edge of the pier, but because he sees a tall, skinny man with thin hair unlock the gate to Slip ZZ and hurriedly walk down.

  He watches as the man hurries to the very last boat, a small but elegant sloop, get on board and go down into the cabin.

  One Way juts his bearded chin to the sky and sniffs the air.

  “As I was saying,” he starts, but the hand on his elbow is not the tour guide but the security guard, whose gloved hand soon turns him over to the custody of the Dana Point police.

  On the drive back to Laguna, One Way tells the cops, “Bobby Z has returned, you know.”

  “Sure he has.” The driver laughs.

  “He has!” One Way yelps indignantly.

  “How do you know?” the cop asks. He’s losing his good humor and is just a tad annoyed that the Laguna cops keep dropping One Way off on the PCH just south of the town border. Why can’t they drive him north for a change, where he could be a pain in Newport Beach’s ass?

  “How do you know?” the cop repeats.

  “I smelled it in the air.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I saw his high priest,” One Way says. “I saw the Monk.”

  “Yippee.”

  “The first time I saw him I didn’t recognize him,” One Way confesses. “But when I saw him get on the boat …”

  “That cinched it, huh?”

  “Definitely.”

  The cop pulls over just across the Laguna line and opens the door.

  “Out,” he says.

  That cinches it, One Way thinks as he starts walking toward downtown Laguna. Cinches it—he likes the cop’s words and adopts them.

  That cinches it, One Way tells himself. The Monk getting on the boat cinches it.

  And the name of the boat!

  The Nowhere.

  Pure Z.

  A legend.

  28.

  “You had Bobby and you let him go?!” Brian screeches.

  He’s red in the face and Johnson thinks he might have a heart attack and die right there.

  Johnson wouldn’t half mind.

  Would be a lot of people show up at the funeral, too. Mexicans just love a good party, and there’d be a lot of singing and dancing at this one. Might even put a toe in myself, he thinks.

  “He had the high ground,” Johnson explains.

  “The fuck does that mean?” Brian whines.

  “Means it would have been a bitch to dig him out of there.”

  “It means you were too chicken to do it!”

  “Maybe.” Johnson shrugs. He thinks of taking Brian out right there. Just pulling his pistol and putting one right between those piggy eyes.

  “We did have a man shot,” Johnson says instead.

  “Big yip.”

  “Don’t worry. We got him patched up.”

  Brian’s worried, though. Not about some lame Tonto but about the hidalgo across the border. Brian’s eyes are bugged out and he’s huffing and puffing and Johnson hopes again that his heart’ll tap out and save them all a lot of trouble.

  “And we didn’t let him get away,” Johnson drawls. “Rojas looped back. He’s trailing him.”

  “What’s he going to do?” Brian asks. “Send up smoke signals?”

  “Gave him a radio.”

  “And?”

  “He headed up Hapaha Canyon—”

  “Didn’t he shoot your man in Hapaha Canyon?”

  “Yup,” Johnson says patiently. “Then he kept heading up Hapaha Canyon.”

  “What did he do that for?”

  Johnson takes a deep breath. He’s running out of patience. “Because he probably figured that’s the opposite of what we’d expect him to do.”

  “Yeah, but Hapaha Canyon’s just going to take him up to Hapaha Flats.”

  “He don’t know that, though.”

  “I guess not.” Brian’s thinking real hard. “Can you take him on the flats?”

  “I expect so,” Johnson says. “Course, the flats ain’t so much flat as they are like a bowl.”

  “Should be easy then,” Brian says. He likes the idea of Bobby Z trapped in a bowl.

  Hell of a lot easier if I could just shoot him, Johnson thinks. Or send Rojas in to cut his throat. But that makes Johnson think about the boy and he doesn’t like thinking about that.

  “Think we can surprise Mr. Z on Hapaha Flats?” Brian asks no one in particular. His morale’s rapidly improving.

  Smile spreading across his fat face.

  “Maybe Willy would like to help …” Brian purrs. “After all, he owes Bobby a dose of pain and humiliation, n’est-ce pas? I think we should make an afternoon of it. I’ll do the Foreign Legion sartorial thing—kepi, neck scarf, jodhpured slacks—and Willy … I’m sure Willy would love to put the ultralight to some practical use for a change.”

  Johnson worries when Brian’s in this voice. It usually means that something dumb is coming up.

  “What are you thinking about?” Johnson asks.

  Brian’s smile is all over his face as he hums that tune from that old Vietnam movie.

  “ ‘Death from the sky,’ ” Brian answers.

  Death from the sky? Johnson wonders.

  The hell is that supposed to mean?

  29.

  Tim and Kit stand on the rim of a big bowl and look down.

  “Holy shit,” Tim says.

  “It’s beautiful!” Kit gasps.

  Five miles of flowers bloom beneath them.

  A bowl of flowers.

  Tim’s seen springtime in the desert before but he’s never seen anything like this. Fucking Mardi Gras down there in that bowl. Bright reds, purples, yellows, golds and colors he doesn’t know the words for. Doesn’t know if there are words.

  In contrast to the usual desert brown, these colors glow from a carpet of green. Tim knows it’s heavy brush—sage, smoke tree, desert tobacco, creosote, brittlebush and mesquite—but from here it looks like a green carpet.

  Under thousands and thousands of wildflowers.

  Like whatever rain the desert gets has poured down into this bowl and voilà, springtime. Like give some acid-crazed painter a five-square-mile canvas and let him paint his craziness out.

  “If you make your eyes cross,” Kit is saying, “it looks like a what-do-you-call-it?”

  “Kaleidoscope?”

  “Yeah. Kaleidoscope.”

>   Tim sees the kid form the word with his lips a couple of times to memorize it.

  Tim looks out across the crazy painting. Smack dab in the center sits a huge goddamn rock, looks to be about the size of a big house. Like it’s been plopped out there like some goofy lawn ornament.

  It’s like a big movie shot, Tim thinks, but he’s not wild about seeing the close-up. Not at all crazy about walking down into a bowl because what happens is that people sit on the rim of the bowl and pick you off. Or they come down into the bowl with more guys than you have—and shit, he has one little kid—and outflank you and you don’t have the high ground and it’s adiós, motherfucker.

  But there isn’t any other choice but to double back and that isn’t a other choice. The canyon walls are too steep to climb with a kid in tow. Besides which, the kid is tired—game but about played out—and Tim knows he’ll probably end up carrying the boy most of the way across. Also knows that if he had any fucking brains at all he’d dump the kid, but the fact that he doesn’t have any brains at all has already been well established so there isn’t any choice but to cross this bowl into the hills on the far side.

  There are a lot of advantages to living alone, Tim thinks, one of them being that you usually get to live longer.

  “Let’s go into the kaleidoscope,” Tim says.

  “Cool. I like kaleidoscopes.”

  “Gonna be hot.”

  The kid shrugs. “It’s the desert.”

  Tim feels a little better about things once they’re down in the bowl, because the brush is so high it’d be hard to see them unless you had an airplane or a helicopter or something. And they’re on some sort of game trail or something, Tim figures, maybe where the coyote hunt jackrabbits or the deer move through, so it’s easy walking and the kid is doing okay so far.

  And there’s color everywhere they look, near and far: the fiery reed blooms of the ocotillo cactus, the bright yellow flowers on the creosote, the greenish-yellow flowers of silver cholla, and the bright rose-colored blooms of the beaver tail. There’s desert lavender and indigo bush and the green spiky yucca and a tall plant with yellow flowers—the century plant that legend says blooms only once in a hundred years.

  And maybe that’s a good-luck sign, Tim thinks. Plant only blooms once every hundred years and here we are to see it. That has to be some kind of luck, and I’m due for a little of the good variety.

  He hears the airplane before he sees it.

  30.

  Johnson’s standing on the rim of the bowl watching the little ultralight putt-putt over the desert floor. Brian standing right beside him in his French Foreign Legion gear, peering through binoculars, looking like that sergeant from that movie he likes so much. Brian says the sergeant in Beau Geste is the first great homosexual villain in cinematic history, but Johnson wouldn’t know about that.

  Johnson’s watching Willy putting around in that ultralight aircraft of his, which looks to Johnson like an aerial go-cart. Sure ain’t nothing he would want to fly in.

  “He looks like a hawk circling his prey,” Brian says without taking his eyes from the glasses.

  He looks like a moron, Johnson thinks. He himself has more confidence in old Rojas trotting behind old Bobby Z and keeping his distance. Rojas don’t need no idiot Kraut zooming around in the sky relaying radio messages as to Bobby’s position. Rojas already knows Bobby’s goddamn position.

  But you give a boy a toy and the boy just has to play with it, Johnson thinks. Brian’s too chickenshit to go up in the little airplane himself and Heinz or Hans or Shithead or whatever his name is is just dying to give the thing a try and says he knows all about them from the Bavarian Aerialist Club or some such thing, so here they are watching the circus.

  He hears the Kraut’s voice over the radio whisper Zuh supject iss proceeting at tventy-sefen dekrees south-southvest and Johnson wonders What the hell is he whispering for? Who’s gonna hear him, the goddamn hummingbirds?

  “He’s proceeding at twenty-seven degrees south-southwest,” Brian says breathlessly.

  “I heard,” Johnson says.

  “Relay it to Rojas,” Brian orders.

  Johnson knows Rojas wouldn’t know twenty-seven degrees from his own asshole but does what he’s told. The only harm is it will annoy Rojas, but who gives a shit whether Rojas is annoyed?

  He hears Brian ask the Kraut, “Do we have him trapped?”

  Ja, vee half him trapped.

  Brian’s so gleeful it about makes Johnson sick.

  “Let’s fuck with his head,” Brian says.

  Johnson’s not sure what that means but he sees the ultralight swoop down. Sees the fucking idiot lean out and wave.

  Then the fucking idiot starts shooting.

  31.

  “Don’t look up,” Tim tells Kit.

  “But—”

  “I know,” Tim says. “But don’t look up.”

  Fucking ultralight has them pinned. Goofy pilot flying right over them, leaning out the cockpit winging pistol shots.

  Dumb fuck, Tim thinks. He knows there’s a kid down here.

  And the kid’s scared now, Tim can see it in his eyes.

  “Shit,” Tim says.

  Kit nods.

  “Magneto,” Tim says ominously, naming the head bad guy from X-Men.

  Kit brightens right away.

  “What’re we gonna do?!” he asks, his voice urgent with mock desperation.

  “We’re gonna run to that big rock!” Tim says. “It has a force field over it and Magneto can’t get through it!”

  “Let’s go!”

  They start running. The game takes the boy past his tired legs and they run with the crazy pilot zooming overhead, whooping and shouting and shooting, and Tim knows it’s hard enough to hit a moving target with a pistol when you’re standing still, never mind when you’re flying a toy plane, so he’s not all that worried about the bullets but still … And the whooping has a funny sound to it, like whooping with a German accent like some old cable-movie villain, and Tim decides it must be the German from the pool so this is personal.

  Okay with me, he thinks.

  Now the Germans singing that “da-da-da-dah-da,” “Death from the sky” music the assault chopper guys used to blast from speakers in the Gulf—scared the Iraqis shitless—and blasting away and Tim’s thinking These guys are nuts.

  We better get to that rock.

  Not that he knows what he’s going to do when he gets there but it has to be better than running like jackrabbits from a hawk.

  He decides they need to get there faster so he stops and shouts, “Cyclops, hop on my back!”

  “I’m okay!”

  “I know! But your super-magnetized spinal protection armor will shield both of us!”

  “Good idea, Wolverine!”

  Fuckin’ A, Tim thinks.

  Kit hops on his back and they start running again, Tim giving it his best Semper Fi sprint like on the obstacle course at Pendleton, like some motherfucking DI is screaming at him and firing live rounds as a motivational tool. Pretty soon he can see the rock close up and maybe there is something to this century plant business, because the rock looks like good luck.

  With that big split running smack down the center.

  32.

  “Where’s he going?” Brian asks urgently.

  “Looks like he ran into Split Rock,” Johnson says.

  This is good news. Smartass damn Bobby Z just ran into a trap. Ran right into the middle of a fifty-foot-high boulder and there’s only two ways out. One end of the narrow crack or the other, and it’d be real easy to seal off one end and go in the other. Boy might as well have run into a corral.

  This game, Johnson thinks, is about over.

  “Do we know that?” Brian asks. He’s concerned because he sees the ultralight pull up, gain altitude and start to circle again. “Are you sure we didn’t lose him?”

  “No, he’s in there.”

  And come night we’ll take him out of there.

&n
bsp; But Brian’s jabbering into his radio, “Confirm the subject’s position. Confirm the subject’s position.”

  He gets his binoculars up again and watches the ultralight circle the rock.

  33.

  Tim’s watching him, too.

  Lying on his back in the split, which is about as wide across as two small men standing shoulder to shoulder, he’s looking up at the sky. The rock is so fucking weird, he thinks as he tries to catch his breath. Like God took an ax and just slammed it down on the rock and cut it in half. And there are weird little pictures carved in the walls.

  “Why are you lying down?” Kit asked.

  “Catching my breath.”

  “Are you out of shape?”

  “Yup.”

  The kid lies down beside him. They watch as the ultralight appears in the crack of blue sky above and then disappears again.

  “He’s pretty high up there,” Kit says. “Do you think he spotted us?”

  “Not exactly,” Tim answers. “But if he knows where we’re not, pretty soon he’s gonna know where we are.”

  “Huh?”

  “I dunno,” Tim says. “Listen, no offense, but I don’t want to talk. I want to catch my breath.”

  “Me, too.”

  The ultralight appears again and Tim figures he about has the guy’s timing down. One or two more orbits and I’ll have my breath nice and steady.

  He waits until there’s no shudder at all in his chest and says, “Do me a favor, Cyclops? Close your eyes?”

  “You mean my eye.”

  “Yeah, okay. Your eye.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Tim thinks he can hear the guy laughing up there but maybe it’s just his imagination. Doesn’t make any fucking difference, as he slowly raises the rifle to his shoulder, sights straight up and waits.

  He sees the ultralight—straight above—high up.

  Tim hums “Da-da-da-dah-da” quietly to himself and squeezes the trigger.

  34.