The Triggerman Dance (46 page)

Holt raised his right hand and aimed his forefinger into the face of one of the boys. The kid had paled.

"Whose turf is this, son?"

"It's yours."

With Holt's finger-barrel aimed between their eyes, the next two agreed.

Holt saved the leader until last. "Whose turf are you on, homie?"

"This here is my fuckin' turf,
pendejo."

Holt hooked the leader in the nose with two fingers. The boy yelped, then struggled upward out of his seat, scrambled across the table through the junk food and the ketchup, spilling drinks with his heavy shoes, walking on air it seemed as Holt forked his head up high and started across the room. Holt looked like a ventriloquist with his dummy. The boy dangled after him, shoes just barely touching the ground. The kid's piece clattered to the floor as he clawed at Holt's upraised hand, to no effect whatsoever. The blood ran down Holt's arm and dripped off his elbow. At the door Holt let him down, blocked the kid's wild roundhouse with one hand, then snapped a kick to the chest that sent the leader reeling backwards faster than his heels could go, finally sprawling him over an unoccupied table. Holt kicked away the gun, walked over, yanked off the kid's bandana and wiped his bloody hand and forearm with it.

"Whose turf are you on?" he asked.

"Yours, man. Your fuckin' turf."

"Remember that. The next time someone with blond hair and blue eyes wants to have lunch in here, you remember that."

He looked around the restaurant one last time before turning to leave. An ocean of bright red seats and yellow tables, a few desultory faces staring back at him, the brightly clad employees behind the aluminum counter dully agog—and all of it outlined in pulsing red.

His heart was beating hard and his breathing was fast and shallow.

They don't understand, he thought.

"Do you?"

John's expression was blank. Maybe he isn't the man we need, thought Holt. Maybe it was too much to expect.

"Do I what, sir?"

"Do
you understand?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

CHAPTER 30

Holt guided the chopper across the dark blanket of the night, felt better now that he had seen the place where Pat had d because he had come through the Red Zone and found Clarity.

It was like having an orgasm of fury instead of an orgasm pleasure.

Now the control stick felt like an extension of his body his body felt like an extension of his mind. To him the Hughes seemed a tiny solar system under his control.

My control.

"What were you trying to accomplish?" asked John.

Holt looked over at him, pleased by his direct, if naive, questions. Sometimes, John seemed so ready to be guided. Maybe
is
what I need.

"Clear my head. I live pissed off twenty-four hours a day. The only time I can get through it to the other side is when I’m right there where it happened. Or when I'm planning justice, getting back on the horse that's thrown me, when I go to where Pat died. The fury boils over into something else."

"Peace?"

"Oh, Christ no. Lucidity. Clarity. Vision. A clean sigh to what I need to do."

John seemed to think about this. Holt watched him star the window, then glance over toward him.

"Are you planning some justice, Mr. Holt?"

"Of course I am. It's my work. I do it every day. You'll see."

"Ever think of vengeance?"

Holt looked at him, pleased again that John was neither as innocent nor obtuse as he could seem.

"Hourly."

Holt could feel the silence forming a question, and he knew what the question was. Once you got John going in a certain direction, he took things all the way. Holt liked that. He liked the way John had tried his best to find the bikers that day in Anza, after they'd torched his home. Follow-through, he thought, one of my favorite qualities in a man.

"No," said Holt. "I did not disappear Ruiz. I never had the chance to. Would have."

"Really?"

"Really. Tried to find him, actually. All of Liberty Ops did. Cops did. Everybody did. No Ruiz. Think he went back to Mexico. I've got some people down there."

"And if you find him?"

"Justice requires his life. So does vengeance. Take your pick."

"What's yours?"

"None needed. Get to the victims of any bad crime, you'll find the same thing. Justice is the law of the state. Vengeance the law of men. Dovetail, sometimes."

"I didn't mean to pry. I just remember the questions you asked me about Jillian."

Holt banked up and away again, watching the lights of the city grow smaller as he climbed up into the darkness. And with every foot he rose in elevation, Holt could feel the Clarity inside, and could enjoy the diminishing strength of his body, could see what he must do. Up here, above the world, was the only place you could really understand. You needed perspective for vision. Patrick was gone. Carolyn was a thousand miles away, it seemed. From here, removed from what had happened to them, untethered to the earth on a clear October night, he could feel the influence of heaven and hell so clearly. He looked over at John Menden—this simple, and in many ways ignorant young man— and felt even more strongly that John was a gift from God. He has been sent to us, thought Holt. A son for Carolyn, a brother for Valerie, a tool for justice. Dropped like manna into the Anza desert.

"So, are you planning justice for what happened to Patrick? More than what just happened back there? More than letting your people look for Ruiz in Mexico?"

Holt turned and bore into John Menden's eyes with his own.

"Justice is larger than Ruiz."

"What can you do, then?"

"Silence, young man. Look. Listen."

They were hovering above the city of Orange now. Ho dipped the chopper down low and hit a search light that threw wide white beam onto the street. This particular downtown spot always made him just a little sick.

"See the street? Right down there, just in front of that store, that's where they parked to go buy their drugs."

"Who did?"

"The people with the infant in their car, and the pet rat. Of course, the couple got stoned, came back to the car and passed out. They slept it off. Rat ate the baby. Three hundred bites. Bled to death. Didn't hear it crying they were so loaded."

"I remember the stories," said John.

Holt steadied the chopper in place, fastening the light beam to the curbside where the car had been parked.

"That was a perfect story, John. Gave everyone on earth someone to hate. Sentimental. Revolting. Plus the couple
was
white. Media couldn't have lavished so much horror on a Black couple, Latins, Asians. Important to crucify the whites when they can. Nourishes the mobs they help create."

"Is that what happened to Patrick?"

"Goodness, yes. Ruiz said Patrick raped his aunt. Aunt said so too, then said she wasn't sure it was Pat, then told Susan Baum that she was positive. I got the Sheriff's transcripts and report from a friend in the department. Teresa Descanso's the aunt. Said she told Ruiz she
thought
Patrick was the man who'd raped her. Wasn't quite sure it was Pat, really. But it was enough for Ruiz in the heat of the moment. Hates gringos anyway. All tied to his political thinking. Plus his aunt was probably scared shitless, and he's a self-proclaimed reincarnated Aztec warrior or some such thing. Naturally, he's got a gun. Anyway, Teresa Descanso wasn’t really sure it was Pat who raped her until Susan Baum got her to say so in the
Journal.
That was during the trial. Made sensation copy. White Mormon son of FBI man, raping poor immigrant women in the barrio. One of Descanso's friends came out and said Pat had raped
her,
too. Baum had a field day with that on figured in a whole backlist of unsolveds. It was open season on Pat. Ruiz took his life and Baum took his good name."

Holt rotated the chopper over the street, then rose up again over the suburb and bore west.

"I hate Ruiz for what he did, but I respect his action," said Holt. "He acted on faulty information. But he acted honestly. It was a public statement. But I loathe Susan Baum. All she did was tell lies for money. That I do not respect. It's the purest distillation of the cancer that's eating this republic. It's everything that will take us down. Disregard for the truth. Slavish devotion to profit. Manipulation of people less sophisticated for advancement of self. Lie upon falsehood upon deceit. Utter destruction of a man's honor, name and reputation. All for entertainment. All to frighten a people already addled by fear. Fear is what sells now. Even better than sex. It's for every age. Every color, every faith and creed. Make them afraid and you can profit from them. They'll pay you to do it. In a just world, John, Ruiz would die for his acts, and Susan Baum would be forced into a life of community service. Untell all the lies. Correct all the errors. Repay all the profits. Personally speak to every person who ever read one of her articles and admit to them that she deceived them. Shine a light where she let darkness in. Whisper the truth where all her lies have festered and grown and rotted and stunk to highest heaven. No wonder God doesn't walk the earth anymore. Can't stand the smell."

He sped into Santa Ana and dropped down toward a darkened, tree-lined street, then used the spotlight to beam a rather quaint, yellow house. "Two months ago, at a party in that house, the gangs went at it. Three dead—one of them a boy of eleven. Turns out the boy was the third brother in a family that had already lost the other two to gang wars. Now the mother lives alone in that yellow house. Husband ran out two years ago. Mexicans."

He sped to Fullerton and hovered over the back yard of a handsome suburban home, illuminating the grass with the spotlight. "Three high school boys murdered their friend right down there—beat him to death with shovels and suffocated him. Poured bleach down his throat. They buried him about a foot down. The ringleader blamed it on Camus'
The Stranger,
which he'd read not long before the murder. Chinese."

He sped over Westminster, lowered the chopper over Bolsa and followed the lights of Little Saigon down the avenue. "Down there at the newspaper office they set an editor on fire because they didn't like his politics. Across the street, at the noodle shop, two girls died in a shootout between rival home invaders. Right down there, at the corner where the light's red, an elderly man was beaten to death one evening, but nothing was taken from him. Politics again. That's the name of the game down there in Little Saigon. They're different than us, John. Vietnamese."