California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  Jack waits for the sun to come up.

  116

  Letty wakes up with a start.

  A sound outside.

  Footsteps on the deck.

  She picks up her weapon from the side table by the bed and holds it in her good hand as she eases along the wall to the door.

  Settle down, girl, she tells herself. Her heart’s racing and her hand’s trembling.

  She gets to the door and looks out through the glass panes.

  Can’t see a thing.

  She lifts the slinged hand up and turns the doorknob. Then kicks the door open and bursts out onto the deck in the shooting position. Swings right—nothing. Swings left—

  The raccoon scrambles down the steps.

  “Shit,” Letty says.

  Puffs a long sigh and gets her breath back.

  Then she laughs at herself and makes a note to get bungee cords for the garbage cans.

  Shuts the door and starts to go back to bed.

  But her arm’s hurting so she goes into the bathroom, turns on the light and takes a couple more Vikes.

  Turns off the light and goes back to bed.

  Lev’s pressed against the corner of the house.

  He watches the light come on and then go off again.

  117

  Nicky watches Paul Gordon walk out of the Starbucks with a cappuccino in his hand. Arrogantly oblivious to the possibility that the world might injure him.

  The driver trails him across the almost empty parking lot toward the bank where Gordon walks up to the automatic teller, rests his cappuccino on the ledge, puts in his card and taps his foot while the machine hums.

  Nicky watches from the backseat as Dani lowers the front passenger window and rests the machine pistol on the edge.

  Gordon gets his cash, grips his two hundred bucks in one hand and his coffee in the other and turns into the spray of bullets that smash into his chest. The cappuccino splashes all over his bloodstained shirt as he falls to the hot asphalt.

  “You’re fired,” Nicky says.

  118

  Teddy Kuhl’s doing the smart thing.

  He’s running.

  Since motherfucking Deputy Dawg’s parting shot that Teddy sang like a bird, Teddy knows it’s only a matter of time before one of his tightest buddies rats him out to the Russians.

  Teddy knows that he is just cash on the hoof.

  So, hurting as he is, he nuts it up, packs a few things, gets on his bike and heads east until this shit cools off. He’s thinking maybe Arizona.

  He is doing a very smart thing.

  Then he does a very stupid thing.

  He stops for a beer.

  Stupider than that, he stops for a beer at a bikers bar called Cook’s Corner, out by Modjeska Canyon. Teddy’s thinking he needs a beer, maybe, and this is the last good beer spot for many dry and lonely miles.

  The beer tastes so good to him he goes for another.

  Gets laughing with some buddies and ends up having five.

  Doesn’t even notice one of his boys on the phone.

  Beer number seven, he decides it’s time to hit the road and get out of Dodge, but he needs to take a piss first. Beer bladder pressing down on him like a fifty-pound weight.

  So he slides off the stool, pushes the metal door into the men’s room and steps up to the stainless-steel trough.

  All by his lonesome in there.

  George Thorogood song blaring from inside the bar—Teddy’s kind of rocking to it as he unzips his fly and lets loose.

  “Aaaaaahhhhh.”

  Hitter steps out from a stall, puts the pistol to the back of Teddy’s head and pulls the trigger.

  Teddy dies with what’s left of his face in the urinal.

  Right next to that little white sponge thing.

  119

  Judge John Bickford gets an anonymous phone call at home, informing him that his years of devoted service to the plaintiff’s bar have been duly noted. That an informant has in fact duly noted it to the California Attorney General’s office, and that a story will appear in tomorrow’s Orange County Register linking him to a murdered Paul Gordon and Paul Gordon to the Russian Mafia.

  Bickford says goodbye to his wife and drives to a motel in Oceanside where he tranquilizes himself with twelve-year-old scotch and Valium and, in the small hours of the morning, slashes his wrists.

  The newspaper story never appears.

  Retired Justice Dennis Mallon gets a similar phone call and catches a flight to Mexico with a connection to Grand Cayman. He has a home there.

  Dr. Benton Howard steps off a curb into an oncoming car. His injuries are so real that he dies of them.

  Word hits the street by morning that Howard was an informant working with the Anti-ROC Task Force.

  120

  Which is working like a mother.

  In what will become known in law enforcement circles as the St Petersburg Day Massacre, Young’s troops roll up Tratchev’s brigade like it’s the freaking Republican Guard.

  Tratchev’s guys are caught flat-footed. They’re grabbed in bars, they’re grabbed in their homes, they’re grabbed in bed with their girlfriends.

  Viktor Tratchev is having a quiet evening at home watching Cops on the Fox network when the door comes crashing in and Special Agent Young comes through with a shotgun in his hands like he’s Robert Stack. Tratchev is annoyed because he thought he had guards out there, but the guards now have their hands behind their backs and plastic ties around their wrists, so technically speaking they’re not really guards anymore.

  “Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?”

  Tratchev reaches for his glasses.

  Which is a mistake, because one of Young’s troops puts two rounds into his chest before Young can scream, “What the fuck are you doing?!” but the fact is that the agent knows exactly what the fuck he’s doing.

  He’s getting in position for a big payday from Nicky Vale is what he’s doing.

  “What you gonna do when they come for you?”

  Jimenez’s boys are romping in L.A.

  Up and down Fairfax, they’re crashing in doors, they’re jamming cars into curbs, they’re blocking off alleys and side streets. They’re scooping up car thieves, drive-down artists, extortionists, drug dealers—the whole first and second All-Star Team of Rubinsky’s and Schaller’s best moneymakers.

  They get Rubinsky and Schaller, too.

  Rubinsky’s in bed with his wife when Jimenez gives him a wake-up call with a pistol barrel to the back of his neck. Schaller’s playing poker with some buddies when the game comes to a sudden halt.

  The sweep misses Kazzy Azmekian.

  He’s not at home.

  He’s twenty nautical miles off Rosarita on his forty-foot Sportscraft for an overnight fishing trip.

  Turns out he can’t swim, because when his trusted bodyguard launches him over the side, Kazzy just sort of goes glug-glug and then disappears into the darkness.

  Anyway, between tragic accidents like this and the task force sweep, Nicky Vale’s self-reinvention as a legitimate businessman is pretty much complete.

  But not quite.

  121

  The noise on the deck wakes Letty up.

  Rattling of garbage cans.

  “Damn raccoons,” she says as she gets out of bed.

  Stumbles for the door and this time doesn’t bother to take her weapon. It’s not like she’s going to shoot the damn thing.

  Lev waits by the corner of the deck.

  Make it look like a rape, is what the pakhan said. Then tear her up with the knife. Just another psycho-sex murder in the Southland. Film at eleven.

  He poises the knife in his left hand.

  Hears her footsteps.

  Hears her open the door.

  Sees her step out.

  “¡Vamos!” Letty yells as Lev starts forward.

  Something stops him.

  A tight cord around his neck pulls him back and down the steps.

  Letty
hears the raccoon run off and closes the door.

  Locks it and goes back to bed.

  Whatever the sound was, it’s gone now.

  122

  Mother Russia finally gets the children to sleep.

  Truth be known, she’ll be happy when Daziatnik rebuilds his own house and moves back in, because while she loves having little Michael with her, the girl Natalie favors her mother and is a real little bitch.

  Quite hopeless, really, genetics being what they are.

  Michael—Michael will be a little prince.

  With some work.

  But Natalie …

  Mother Russia goes into the bathroom, brushes her teeth, scrubs her face, then takes a brush to her hair.

  A hundred strokes, every morning and every night, and that is what will keep it beautiful and full, the way Daziatnik so admires it.

  She finishes brushing it and stands back to admire her look in the mirror.

  That’s when she sees the man behind her.

  It must be one of the new guards.

  But the nerve, to come into her bedroom—

  “What—” she starts to snap.

  Then the man’s hand is over her mouth.

  A cloth over her nose.

  Then blackness.

  123

  Nicky lights up a joint.

  Savors the sweet musky scent, takes a deep hit, lets it swirl around in his lungs and then releases it. Feels all the tension go out with the smoke.

  All problems dissolving into the night air.

  Tratchev dead.

  His troops locked up.

  Rubinsky and Schaller swept up with their troops.

  The late Dr. Benton Howard’s reputation as a police informer firmly established.

  Paul Gordon fired.

  Kazzy Azmekian is flotsam. Or is it jetsam? Nicky can never remember. Doesn’t matter.

  He takes another toke, slips out of his clothes and lets himself ease into the Jacuzzi’s steaming water.

  Fifty million dollars coming his way tomorrow. The turnaround in one generation.

  A very good night, and some very good boo.

  He feels a small twinge of anxiety. Lev hasn’t returned yet, to report that the problem of the sister is no more. Nicky does another hit and lets the problem fly from his mind. What Lev sets out to kill, Lev kills. He’ll be back soon.

  So Nicky’s having a very good night. He has the whole thing working for him, Tratchev dead, a big payday coming up on the morrow and life is way cool. He shuts his eyes and stretches out, and then feels something round against his toes.

  He’s like annoyed, because he has told Michael not to kick his soccer ball around the pool and the Jacuzzi.

  Nicky goes to pick the ball up and screams.

  Falls backward against the side of the Jacuzzi and cowers there.

  And just stares at Lev’s severed head bobbing up and down in the bubbling water.

  Nicky’s going fetal when Dani gets there.

  Dani plucks Lev’s head up by the hair and just howls in pain.

  There’s a ribbon around Lev’s neck.

  Something written on it, but even if they weren’t so freaked they couldn’t read it.

  It’s written in Vietnamese.

  Nicky runs into the house.

  To Mother’s room.

  Her door is ajar and he can see the flickering silver light of the television.

  He opens the door without knocking.

  “Mother—”

  A man sits on the bed watching television. He casually swings his silenced pistol in Nicky’s direction.

  “Hello, Daz,” Karpotsov says. “I’m sorry—it’s Nicky now, isn’t it?”

  “Colonel.”

  “It’s General now,” Karpotsov says.

  Nicky is like freaking, but Nicky stays cool.

  “Congratulations,” he says.

  “Thanks,” Karpotsov says. “Is this HBO?”

  “Cinemax.”

  “I like it.”

  “I’m glad,” Nicky says.

  “Well,” Karpotsov says, “congratulations, Nicky. I understand that you have quite the deal in the works. Well done, your country is proud. You were going to cut us in, weren’t you, Nicky? Or did you think I was dead?”

  “I had hopes in that direction,” Nicky says. “Where is my mother?”

  “She’ll be staying with us for a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “Well, let me put it this way,” Karpotsov says. “We want our fucking money.”

  Dude.

  We want our piece.

  Of California Fire and Life.

  124

  The sun comes up enough to make out shapes.

  That early-morning hour when everything is in shades of gray.

  Jack starts up the ravine that cuts into the bluff. He climbs until he comes to the old fence. Ducks under it, just the way he did when he was a kid, and he’s in the old trailer park.

  Very weird, very strange being here knowing it belongs to Nicky Vale. That Nicky’s planning on turning it into a tract of condos and town houses. That he killed his wife by way of raising the capital.

  Jack picks his way through the eucalyptus and pine trees. He walks past old trailer pads and then a Dumpster.

  He opens the lid of the Dumpster, shines the light in and jumps back.

  Two charred, cracked skulls.

  Exploded from the inside out by intense heat.

  Tommy Do and Vince Tranh.

  Jack closes the lid.

  Moves on toward the old, decrepit rec hall he used to run around in. When he was eight it was a fort. When he was ten it was a rock ’n’ roll hall. When he was fifteen it was make-out heaven.

  The old hall is in bad shape. Some boards ripped out, shingles stripped, but the two wide old doors are still intact.

  And there’s a shiny new padlock on them.

  A combination lock.

  Jack finds a rock and smashes the hasp.

  The door swings open like it’s been an exhausting effort to stay shut.

  First thing Jack sees is the bed.

  He pulls up a dustcover and there it is.

  The Robert Adam four-poster canopied bed with the castle on top. Incredibly beautiful with its silk and fabrics and intricately carved coat of arms. The video didn’t do it justice.

  The freaking room is filled with furniture. All draped in cloth dustcovers, they look like monuments, like ghosts. Jack goes around turning back the covers.

  The George III writing desk, the Hepplewhite chair, the Matthias Lock rococo console table.

  “It’s all here,” Jack says to himself.

  The mahogany armless chairs, the silent valet, the Kent mirror, the side table, the gilt chairs, the card table—Jack’s looking at it but what he sees in his mind is Pamela Vale walking him through. Like she’s there in the old rec hall pointing to each piece as Nicky holds the camera.

  This is one of our real treasures. A rare bombé-based red-lacquered and japanned bureau-cabinet from about 1730. It has clawed and hairy paw feet. Also, serpentine-shaped corners with attenuated acanthus leaves. A very rare piece.

  It’s all here.

  Nicky’s precious furniture. Over half a million dollars’ worth.

  Times two. Once for the insurance settlement, twice when he sells it again.

  It’s more than that, though. It’s his identity, his ego, his freaking shifting cloud.

  What he killed his wife to hold on to.

  His wife, the two Vietnamese kids, George Scollins, God only knows who else. For a pile of old wood. For a bunch of fucking things. Even though he stood to make $50 million and it would have been safer to burn this stuff, Nicky couldn’t stand to do it.

  And now it’s going to cost him fifty mil.

  And his claim.

  And everything else, if Jack has his way.

  125

  Dawn at Mother Russia’s.

  Very happy place.

&nbs
p; Nicky pours himself a cup of coffee and sits trembling on a stool at the kitchen counter.

  Two million in cash.

  And a big piece of Nicky’s deal.

  Is what Karpotsov wants to release Mother.

  “Or we’ll start burning her,” Karpotsov said. “We’ll send you some of the charred pieces. First a finger, then we’ll start getting serious. Then it’s a hand, then a foot. When we’re fresh out of Mother, we’ll grab the kids and start on them. You tried to fuck us, Nicky. You owe us money. Serious money that you stole from your country.”

  “My country doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Then from us,” Karpotsov said.

  “KGB doesn’t exist anymore, either,” Nicky said. “All there is left of my country is a dipso-buffoon and the mob.”

  “Nicky,” Karpotsov said, shaking his head. “Don’t you get it? We are the mob. The mob is us. Organizatsiya. One and the same. We’ve come to an understanding. And the only reason that I don’t chop your mother into little pieces and feed them to you before blowing your brains out is that you’re a profitable little motherfucker. A thief’s thief, and you’re going to start stealing for us again, Nicky. Two million dollars in good faith money. Or we start burning her. That’s your old technique, isn’t it, Nicky? From Afghanistan? Didn’t you like to burn people?”

  “I’ll get the money for you!”

  “You’d better.” Karpotsov got off the bed. “Well, I’d like to see the end of the movie but I’m sure you have things to arrange. Like, later, dude.”

  He got up and left.

  Nicky had a very restful night.

  Closing his eyes, he saw Lev’s dome bobbing up and down in the water. Opening his eyes, he saw them taking a torch and—

  He spent most of the night pacing the house.

  Now, this morning, Nicky loses it. “They came into the house where my children sleep and took my mother!”

  Slams his hand on the kitchen counter.

  Temper, temper, he tells himself.

  Temper will do you no good.

  Think it through.

  Karpotsov is a reality that must be dealt with and dealt with quickly.