The Death and Life of Bobby Z

by Don Winslow

  Johnson sees the headlights as they turn into the parking lot. The lights flash across the window and change shape as the car turns in. Johnson sits up in his chair and damn near stops breathing, he’s so afraid Bobby Z can hear him. Johnson gets up and moves against the wall. He hears the car pull in and the motor stop, so he raises the rifle to his cheek and waits for the sonofabitch to come through the door.

  Listens real hard for the sound of footsteps.

  Hears car doors open, and one car door close, and hears the boy yell, “I’ll unlock the door!”

  51.

  Tim lets Kit run ahead. It’s taking Tim a little time to turn his sore body sideways and ease out of the car, especially with the bandages and tape that Kit plastered all over his side after they stopped in that drugstore in El Cajon. Also, Tim needs to get the bag full of money out of the trunk, but then he realizes that Kit has the key.

  And Kit’s running for the door.

  “Hey, I need the keys!” Tim yells.

  But Kit keeps running and yells back, “I have to go to the bathroom!”

  Tim figures the bag can wait for a second. He starts to follow Kit when he remembers something. Remembers he left the light on over the sink and the cabin is totally dark.

  “Stop!” he yells to Kit, and Tim starts running to catch him, because the boy is just giggling and running to unlock the door before Tim can catch him.

  “Last one in is a rotten egg!” Kit sings out.

  Then the night turns bright white.

  52.

  What happens is that Johnson risks a peek out the window and sees Bobby Z chasing up the path after the boy, and he hears Bobby yell “Stop!” and he just knows Bobby ain’t coming through that door.

  But Johnson figures he can shoot over the boy’s head and hit Bobby smack in the chest, so Johnson cradles the gun in one arm and pushes the door open with the other. He’s standing in the doorway lifting the rifle to his cheek when there’s this moment of stillness like the world is frozen, and then the blast takes his head from his shoulders.

  Tim keeps pushing through the light that’s turned from white to red as the cabin catches fire. Half blinded by the explosion, he screams, “Kit! Kit!” and a couple of thousand nights go by until he hears the boy cry, “Bobby!”

  Tim has an image of the boy maimed: legs blown off, or arms missing or face burned to jelly and it’s at least another thousand hours before he has Kit in his arms and the boy is crying and his hair is a little singed but he seems all right.

  And for some reason Tim keeps repeating, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and Kit just keeps sobbing but between gulps says, “It’s okay.”

  “Are you okay?” Tim asks.

  “I think so.”

  “Thank God,” Tim says. “Thank God.”

  He holds the boy tighter and is sitting in the wet grass cradling the boy to his chest when he hears the motorcycle pull into the parking lot. Recognizes Boom-Boom straightaway and realizes he has problems he didn’t know he had.

  Boom-Boom comes waddling up the path, a beer bottle clutched in one fat fist. It’s the beer bottle that kills him, because when he recognizes Tim huddling on the ground the smile comes off his face but he forgets he’s holding the bottle as he goes for the gun in his belt.

  In that second Tim shoots him three times, the silenced pistol sounding mute and hollow against the crackling fire. Boom-Boom finally drops the beer bottle, then sits down heavily on the lawn and tries to figure out why he feels so sick and tired so quickly, and he just watches as Tim Kearney runs by him with what looks like a large package in his arms.

  Boom-Boom hears a car trunk open and close, then hears his own bike start up and roar off and figures that he should do something about that. But it seems like so much work to get to his feet, and the fire is so pretty. So he just sits staring at the cowboy boots on the porch and admiring his own handiwork, and that’s the way the volunteer firemen find him when they get there a few minutes later.

  Kit’s holding on to Tim for all he’s worth and it’s like that first night they escaped from Brian’s except this is no dirt bike but an all-American Harley hog and Tim is pushing it down that mountain road.

  Because Tim Kearney knows that the Angels’ll never quit now, and Huertero won’t quit, and Gruzsa won’t quit and there isn’t going to be any new quiet life in Oregon.

  Not for Tim Kearney or Bobby Z.

  Or for the kid.

  So Tim pushes the hog down the mountain road and then heads west. West and north and west again.

  If there’s no escape from being Bobby Z, he’ll just have to be Bobby Z.

  Be Bobby Z and beat ’em all.

  Become a legend.

  And that means going to Laguna.

  53.

  Under normal circumstances Tad Gruzsa would have considered attending Raymond “Boom-Boom” Boge’s wake a pleasure trip. Few things would have improved a soft California evening better than seeing that slimy bag of guts laid out in a cheap casket while his mourning brethren drank, smoked and fucked around him.

  Gruzsa would have enjoyed tilting a couple of beers, insulting the assembled scumbags and tripping back out into the night.

  But the evening is spoiled for him now by the knowledge that Tim Kearney is once again on the loose and that everyone who gets too near him ends up taking a dirt nap.

  Tim’s leaving bodies scattered behind him like Little Johnny Stiff-seed. A regular one-man crime wave, and Gruzsa’s not too thrilled by the prospect of explaining why he turned this career felon loose on the public.

  And someone’s bound to figure it out, because Timmy-boy is leaving quite a trail. First you have the great Anza-Borrego Desert Massacre—Parts One and Two—then an otherwise inexplicable fiasco at the San Diego Zoo, then you have a quiet mountain cabin motel turned into a funeral home slash crematorium.

  The owner commits a very dicey suicide, shoving a pistol through his own teeth and getting two shots off. Then you got a headless cowboy whose good-old-dead-boy truck ID’s him as one Bill Johnson, former ranch manager for known livestock merchant, the also late and unlamented Brian Cervier. Top that off with the body of Boom-Boom, found sitting at the fire scene like he’s roasting marshmallows, except that he’s got three bullets in him in a tight pattern.

  Like, Gruzsa thinks with some pride, a Marine might fire.

  “Shame about Boom-Boom,” Gruzsa remarks to a silver-haired Angel sitting on a stool by the casket, which is resting on two sawhorses. The Angel is old enough to look like he plays for the Grateful Dead, but Gruzsa knows that Duke, as the head of all the Southern California chapters, has serious juice. Which is why Gruzsa’s here in the first place.

  “Fuck you, Gruzsa,” Duke says. “Did I mention I fucked your mother and your sister?”

  “My mother’s dead and my sister’s a dyke,” Gruzsa answers. “So it sounds like you.”

  He reaches into the cold water of the garbage can, pulls out an icy bottle of Red Dog, snaps the lid open on one of the casket handles and says, “Boom-Boom makes a lovely corpse, though, don’t you think, sweetheart?”

  “What brings you here, Gruzsa?”

  “Other than the joy of seeing Boom-Boom laid out?” Gruzsa asks. “I’ll tell you, this has been a banner year for wakes. First Stinkdog and now Boom-Boom. I’m telling you, Kearney’s taking out the whole family, huh?”

  Duke glares at him. “Kearney did this?”

  “I thought you knew that,” Gruzsa says. “I thought you knew everything, Duke.”

  Gruzsa lets him sit with this and takes a look around. It’s not a wake any Polish boy would recognize. Music blasting, booze and reefer reeking. Over in the corner two mamas are dispensing blow jobs while in the other corner there’s a polite line for gang bang, although Gruzsa can’t see the bangee.

  “Did you set Boom-Boom up?” Duke asks.

  “No, I set Kearney up,” Gruzsa answers. “For Boom-Boom. But the dumb prick fucked it up. I have to tel
l you, Duke—and not to speak bad of the dead—but I think the Boge family stands about ankle deep in the old gene pool, you know?”

  He drains the beer and reaches for another.

  “Help yourself,” Duke says.

  “Thanks.” Gruzsa wipes his wet sleeve off on the edge of the casket. “I were you doofs, I’d look around Laguna.”

  “They only got fags in Laguna.”

  “Yeah, well, to date this fag has greased the entire Boge family, half a fucking tribe of Indians and some cowboy from East County who was supposed to be a pretty tough hombre,” Gruzsa says. “So when you’re cruising around Laguna, watch your ass.”

  “You know where he is, why don’t you just pick him up?”

  “I don’t want him picked up,” Gruzsa says. “I want him dead.”

  Duke smiles. He has chipped front teeth and long canines, makes him look like an old wolf.

  “We can make him dead.”

  “That’s what Boom-Boom said.”

  “Boom-Boom went out alone.”

  “So?”

  “We’re going with an army.”

  Gruzsa tosses the empty bottle into the casket and walks out.

  54.

  Tim finds the trailer on the beach.

  It’s like a mobile home, he thinks, not much different from the one he grew up in—or failed to—in Desert Hot Springs. A fucking mobile just like any trailer-park trash would live in, except this one sits on the beach in El Morro Canyon. Sits among about twenty others in an isolated curve where the beach rounds into a huge rock cliff. And on top of the huge rock cliff is an enormous white house with two-story glass windows that look out over the ocean on three sides.

  So it’s a little different from the mobile home where Tim grew up—or failed to—which had a view of five other mobile homes and a junked-car lot.

  Anyway, it’s real pretty there. The ocean’s pretty, the beach is pretty, the big rock cliff is pretty, and Tim Kearney is finally living on the beach.

  Which is a bitch, Tim thinks. I gotta have half the world trying to kill me before I finally get to live on the beach.

  It’s taken him some time to get up here. After racing off Mount Laguna, he’d dumped the motorcycle in Carlsbad and caught the late Amtrak train, which he rode to San Juan Capistrano, Kit asleep most of the way and real quiet anyway.

  Tim got off the train in San Juan Cap, walked a couple of blocks in the barrio and in forty-five minutes flat had the pink slip to a rebuilt ’89 Z-28 muscle car, which maybe even had had other owners who at one point in time had reported it missing.

  Then Tim drove down to the Pacific Coast Highway through Dana Point, Monarch Bay, Salt Creek, Aliso Niguel, South Laguna and into the town of Laguna Beach.

  Gets weird fucking vibes in Laguna, like it’s, you know, Bobby’s town and Bobby’s ghost is hanging out, and Tim’s a little spooked by everyone he sees, especially in the all-night 7-Eleven where he buys a couple of hot dogs for himself and a bean-and-cheese burrito for Kit.

  They get back in the car and drive north out of town until they spot the sign for El Morro Canyon and Point Reef Beach, and there’s a dirt road that jogs back north at a sharp angle and takes them to the back of the mobile homes that line the cove by the rock cliff.

  They find number 26, and it’s basic but well kept. A kitchen with a sitting room, two small bedrooms and a bath. Nice covered porch on the beach side.

  A nice getaway, and Tim can’t get it out of his head that this is where Bobby and Elizabeth used to come to screw and it must have meant something to Bobby because he holds on to it.

  Tim figures that because he is Bobby now, the place belongs to him, and it’d be nice to live in a place like this. This place would do him just fine, man. Simple, basic and on the beach, and there’s a school right across the road that he could like walk Kit to. Maybe he could even learn to surf and teach Kit, who should be like a natural, right, and it’s then that Tim figures out what the place smells like.

  Wax.

  Surfboard wax, and Tim pictures Bobby just coming here to chill before he split. Place to get away from being the great Z and just sit here and wax your board and go out and ride the waves and come back, sit on the porch and have a cup of coffee, watch the sun go down. Maybe then go back into the bedroom with Elizabeth—and I could get into that life. Make dinner for the kid, sit down and eat, talk about school and surfing and comic books and shit. And Kit would grow up to be one of those cool California kids, man. Kid who grows up on the beach in maximum-cool Laguna.

  I have to cut this fantasy shit out, he thinks. There isn’t going to be any staying here, living here, walking Kit to school, surfing and boffing a beautiful woman with a long back, flat stomach and shiny hair. There’s just going to be getting stiffed out unless I can find what I need to get to Huertero, and then there’s still Gruzsa, and the Angels and maybe now this fucking Monk.

  So what I need to do is be thinking about how to find out what I need to find out and then get the fuck out.

  And get the kid back to his mom, which is like where the kid should be, I guess.

  So how to learn what I need to learn, Tim is thinking as he puts Kit to bed and sits beside him. Same old Tim Kearney, man, behind the learning curve again, and I guess what I have to do is I have to call old Monk and find a way of getting him to tell me what he knows.

  And Kit, poor little bastard, has hardly said a word since almost getting blown up and like, big surprise, right?

  “You okay?” he asks the boy.

  “Yeah,” Kit says—kind of defensive, like he wouldn’t admit it if he wasn’t.

  “What’d you see back there?” Tim asks, hoping the kid saw a bright white light and nothing else, because Tim can still see Johnson’s headless body and those cowboy boots and while he saw a lot of that kind of shit in the Gulf, it’s nothing a kid needs to have in his head.

  “Nothing,” Kit says.

  “This’ll be over soon, man,” Tim promises. “I’ll get you back to your mom.”

  “I don’t want to go back to her.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll talk about it, okay?” Tim says. “You better get some sleep. I’ll be right here.”

  He gives the boy a hug and a kiss and feels the kid’s lips on his cheek, which feels like real weird but all right. He’s about out the door when he hears Kit ask, “Why do people want to kill you?”

  Tim’s not real sure himself but he has the general answer to hand: “Because I’ve done some bad things in my life.”

  “You fucked up?”

  “Don’t use that kind of language,” Tim says. “But, yeah—big-time.”

  Seems to satisfy the kid, seems to be enough.

  “I’ve done that,” Kit offers.

  It’s generous of the boy to say that, thinks Tim, who hasn’t been real familiar with generosity in his life.

  “It’ll be okay,” Kit adds. Then he rolls over and pulls the blankets over him.

  Which is real nice of the boy to say, Tim thinks, but he’ll be damned if he knows how it’ll be okay.

  He knows he has to get out there, meet Monk again and find out what he knows. Get his hands on enough money to get lost and stay lost and deliver the kid back. All of which is impossible enough but really impossible with a kid in tow.

  And I’m just not going to bring him into the line of fire again, Tim decides. I know that.

  So he’s going to have to find a baby-sitter, and he’s sitting looking out the window watching the moonlight on the waves and thinking about how the hell he’s going to find someone he can trust, when there’s a soft knock on the door and it’s Elizabeth.

  55.

  Tim puts his forefinger to his lips and says, “The kid’s asleep.”

  She shuts the door softly behind her and takes off her vinyl wind-breaker. Tosses it on the old couch under the window.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t,” she says. “I’ve been driving by checking for lights every ni
ght.”

  She looks great. Got on some silky kind of emerald green blouse tucked into stonewashed jeans. Boat shoes, no socks. Skinny little gold necklace that dips down from her throat to the rise of her breasts.

  “How’s Kit?” she asks.

  “Pretty shook up,” he answers.

  “You mind if I sit down?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She sits down on the couch and her jeans crease into a sharp V between her legs. She stretches one arm out along the back of the couch and says, “Don Huertero’s looking for you.”

  “No shit.”

  There’s that sparkle of laughter in her eyes that for some reason makes him add, “So’s Brian, for that matter.” She shakes her head. “Brian’s dead.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” she answers. “Huertero gave Brian what he wanted to give you. He left him naked out in the sun for a few hours, then tied him to the bumper of a four-wheeler and took him for a spin through the cactus. Be glad you weren’t there.”

  “I am.”

  “Huertero sent Johnson to hunt for you.”

  “Johnson found me.”

  He watches her eyebrow curve into an elegant arch of curiosity.

  “But a booby trap took his head off before we had much of a chance to talk.”

  She looks really alarmed.

  “Christ,” she said. “Kit didn’t see that, did he?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Christ.”

  He sits beside her on the couch.

  “Casa del Brian is all burned down,” she says.

  A flicker of something … suspicion, maybe … flicks across his stomach, and he asks, “How did you get out?”

  “Well, Brian beat the shit out of me and that seemed to satisfy Don Huertero.”

  “He just let you go?”

  “No,” she says, looking him in the eyes. Giving him that cynical, intelligent, kind of angry look. “He didn’t just let me go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know what that means.”