“LEBANON. That’s where I got scared for the first time.” Tina Z. was confessing to Fish. “The crazy Stone Age villages in the shadow of skyscrapers and all these chic, Eurotrash beachfront hotels. Skinny, wide-eyed young studs jacked on nicotine and religion. All these women covered up in those crazy tent dresses, whatayacallum, chadors, head to toe. Floating down the streets like black ghosts.”
She knew Fish had little interest in things thousands of miles away, but talking kept her mind off Bert.
“The fuck were you doing in Lebanon?”
“Legal attaché thing. Investigating the embassy bombing.” She said, “Lemme just tell you, Hazel, the Middle East, what we’re doing there? Is not a sustainable thing. This whole Iran-Contra mess? It’s wrong. We’re in over our heads. And you know what? Sooner or later a hard rain’s gonna fall.”
“Here or there?”
Tina just shook her head: wherever. Maybe Bert’s meeting with Van Houten was just some crazy coincidence.
“I don’t know,” Fish said. “Reagan got the hostages back. I gotta believe he knows what he’s doing.”
Tina Z. was well aware of how Fish stood on the subject, and didn’t care. “I was billeted right next door to the Marine barracks when they blew. Did I tell you that?”
“No way.”
“Yeah. They put me and this other girl up separate from the guys because, you know: woman.”
Fish nodded, mostly missing her sarcasm. “That must’ve been insane.”
“Knocked us out of our beds,” said Tina. “We ran out into this storm of dust and smoke. A couple snipers were shooting down from the tops of buildings, luckily they were shitty marksmen, we kept hearing the pop of the missed shots, and the chipped cement spitting around us. And then this weird roaring hush. It went on for a while, before we figured out what it was: hundreds of voices, yelling for help.”
She stopped.
Tina stared out the window at the sunbaked sweep of high desert, and the bleached cinder-block- and clapboard-clad shop that was Gun Heaven, two hundred yards distant. Fish didn’t say anything. The car broiled, despite the air-conditioning, forming little thermals where the cool air swerved and settled at their feet, while the tops of their heads felt like they were in an oven.
“You have nightmares about it?” Fish asked after a while.
“I started meditating on the number forty thousand. Which is how many children die every day from easily preventable illnesses,” Tina said. “Forty thousand. Recognizing reality leads you away from the self-centered into a more, you know, transcendent realm.” She glanced at Fish; he nodded soberly but probably had no idea what in the world she was talking about.
“Where going with the flow is the only option,” Tina added, helpfully.
“How’s the baby?”
Tina didn’t like thinking about Willa while she was working. “Good. Fun.”
Luckily, Fish was terrible with small talk that didn’t involve off-roading, football, or porn stars. They fell quiet. Tina drowsed, sleepy, and wondered if she could risk taking a quick nap. But Fish finally found the courage to ask the question that for the past couple of hours she’d been worried he’d ask. “Hey. So. Are you and Kirby . . .”
Tina Z. looked at him. He was looking straight ahead, out of the car, his face a little red. “No,” she lied.
“Oh.” Fish kept staring out the windshield. “Good. I mean, I didn’t think so. It’s just sometimes, when we’re all together. All that shit with the suit.”
“No,” she lied again. “Jesus, Hazel.”
“Yeah. Sorry. I . . .”
It was awkward. Tina’s eyes softened. Fish had a crush on her, she knew it; she couldn’t reciprocate. Couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or both, it didn’t matter. Life was weird and complicated, and ultimately, she had decided, long ago, a matter of managed disappointment. She wished Hazel could just be a friend, she needed friends.
Gun Heaven was closed. No cars parked out front. Windows empty, door double-bolted with a security gate pulled across it. Nothing moving.
Dust devils gyred through a yard of rusting barrels.
Their police scanner crackled: “Stand by.”
Fish squirmed in his seat and tugged at his jeans. Tina mused: Standing by was the organizing principle of her career.
—
“YOU LOST HIM?” U.S. Attorney Colter’s face warped with irritation, and Kirby got a glimpse of how hard she’d look middle-aged: “You lost him. I don’t understand. How could you lose him?”
Air-conditioning blew stale waves of respite over Kirby and Colter in the Federal Building cafeteria, with the furniture that looked like some second-rate Danish designer had unloaded all his bad ideas for teak laminate. They sat across from each other at a little table surrounded by twenty matching empty table-and-chairs sets.
“He burned his house down,” Kirby explained to Colter, slow and deliberate, as if she hadn’t heard him before. “We found his car abandoned on a side street in La Jolla.”
“And where were we? You didn’t have eyes on him?”
Kirby stared at her, dumbfounded. “You wouldn’t approve it,” he said.
“I wouldn’t approve protection. I didn’t say you couldn’t have somebody watching him.”
This was said with a mother’s scolding tone and there was no irony in it; Kirby was beginning to wonder if she had a sense of humor at all. He looked away and let a silence rise. A lone craft service employee was counting cash from the register drawer and putting it in the bank deposit pouch for later.
This was the room where Kirby had first made love with Tina Z. On this very Danish modern table, after hours, dark, the door locked, her lean, strong legs up over his shoulders like bolsters.
And now the evil queen.
“I want him back,” Colter insisted.
“We don’t need him.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“He’s broken. We broke him.”
“I don’t care.”
“Probably going to ground.”
“What?”
“Seclusion. Hiding.”
“I don’t care.”
“The bomb was meant for him; people from his past want to kill him for fear he’ll rat them out, thanks to us. Or Poole, take your pick. But both, really.” Kirby stood up, agitated, and walked away from the table, and came back. He put his hands flat and leaned down. “Everything he cared about is gone, you haven’t got any leverage over him anymore.”
“Not me, we.” Sabrina Colter scoffed, “And he’s still a material witness in a major Justice Department investigation—”
“I’m thinking the gun dealer, Van Houten, is gonna give us our Mexican drug connection. I’m focusing on that.”
“I will not run this department on hunches and guesses.”
“You’re not running anything, you’re an errand girl for a bunch of Washington ideologues.”
She narrowed her eyes and showed teeth. “Gilbert, don’t push me. I can have you transferred to the fraud desk, you’ll wither and die under an avalanche of actuarial tables before you see another criminal case.”
“It’s not a hunch. We get Van Houten, we can roll him on whoever ordered the hit on Mahrez, find out who is flooding our region with weasel dust, and call it a very good day. You’ll probably get your first citation for meritorious work.”
“And Mahrez?”
“You mean Poole, don’t you?” Before she could answer, Kirby said to her, as if to a child: “This case is about cocaine coming across the Mexican border to some unknown in-country wholesaler. And murder-for-hire.”
“People who do drugs deserve their fate. We’re at war. I want Mahrez,” Colter said petulantly.
“No. You and your cronies want to upend a rising progressive Democrat who’s threatening the conservative hegemony in San Diego County.”
She was unruffled. “It’s all of a piece: your part, my part. Why can’t we both have what we want?”
“What you want has already caused the death of an innocent woman and her bodyguard.”
“Nobody is innocent!” she exploded. “Not her! Not the Guatemalan rent-a-cop! Not this morally corrupt, leftist, welfare-spreading mayor who tells people whatever they want to hear!” She took a beat, calming. “Not Mahrez.” And then, looking fiercely, accusingly, at Kirby. “Not you.”
Kirby thought: You have no idea.
But then, as he stared at her longer, and she said nothing, just stared back, he understood, and it scared him: Oh, shit. Maybe she does.
—
“I GUESS MY POINT IS, you spend a little time out in the real world, it makes you appreciate coming back to a civilized society.”
“Middle East is the real world?”
Tina said that it was, now. She was sweating like a warthog, felt warm rivulets of perspiration running under her tactical vest.
“What about the Soviet fucking Union?” Fish said, and she could tell he was still raw from asking her about Kirby. “Or China. Stirring all that shit up in Salvador, right on our fucking doorstep? Middle East is a bunch of camel jockeys a million miles away, I mean, tents and carpets, right? And oil, but. Meanwhile a thousand nukes are pointed our way by a population of raging, first-world communists just itching to blister our free-loving butts the minute we take our eye off the ball. Thank God for Ronald fucking Reagan.”
He was serious. Tina burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it.
“What?”
Eyes watering, her bladder aching from warm Diet Pepsi, she tilted against the armrest and laughed. Fish wasn’t smiling. He looked hurt.
“What?”
The radio crackled, a spotter barked “Suspect incoming,” and moments afterward a high-water Chevy pickup truck with huge tires and decals and a blue-chrome roll bar came thundering into the dusty gun shop parking lot, made a wide circle like a dog settling down, and parked facing out.
The gun dealer, Van Houten, dropped two-footed out of the cab like a little kid dismounting a high swing. For a moment Tina thought of Bert again, and the potential shitstorm coming, then pushed it from her mind. It was a coincidence, she wanted to keep telling herself. She watched as the fat man hitched up his jeans, unfurled a jangling snarl of keys, and started to unlock the door.
Fish had already turned the ignition and dropped the car into gear when Tina Z. put a hand on his because the radio crackled again with “Stand by.” Sure enough, a filthy Land Rover had followed the pickup into the Gun Heaven yard and now slotted in beside it. Two sturdy white women in high-collared, ankle-length prairie dresses and Marie Osmond hairdos emerged, the younger one, a teenager, visibly pregnant. Van Houten barked at them from the shop doorway, then disappeared inside.
Tina sighed. “Dammit.”
“Well, this just got complicated,” the radio concurred with her. “Over.”
A third car rumbled in: Japanese four-door, Accord or Acura, Tina noted, or something equally generic, even Fish couldn’t tell the difference from distance. It eased up directly behind the truck, and a pair of spry sixty-somethings climbed stiffly out and stretched, a bronzed silver fox and his pinkish wife, tennis shorts and sundress, respectively, twitching nervous energy as they watched Van Houten’s women get to work. The hot wind off the Anza-Borrego badlands barely trembled the teased mullets of lacquered tresses made more hat than hair; the pregnant one climbed up into the truck bed and fired up an air compressor while the older woman popped the trunk of their car, then collected an air wrench the teen handed down to her and started powering off bolts holding the sedan’s rear quarter-panel in place.
“Surreal,” Fish remarked.
Van Houten reemerged from Gun Heaven with an armload of automatic weapons cocooned in Bubble Wrap.
“What are those,” Tina wondered, “M16s?”
“No, it’s that Soviet commie AK piece of shit.”
The quarter-panel was off the sedan. Van Houten and the pregnant teen packed and duct-taped the guns into some dead space above one wheel well, then moved to the other side to do the same with more Kalashnikovs while the older woman began to power-bolt the first fender back in place. The retirees just waited, chattering like it was a church picnic.
“Snowbirds are looking at eighteen months in Lompoc,” Fish said.
“Do these old people even think?”
“Not to defend them, but it ain’t easy living on a fixed income. Inflation. Social Security and a maybe pension that got skeezed in the savings and loan scandal. Someone tells them you can make easy money driving a car across the border, don’t ask questions. Couple thousand bucks for a few hours, maybe time even to stop at a dog track, two-dollar frozen strawberry margaritas and a boxed trifecta.”
“Still.”
Fish was gesturing. “Well, hey, lucky day: Here’s your weapons case all wrapped up with a bow, Tina Z.”
The radio hissed, “Agent Z., you want to bust the snowbirds, too? Over.”
Tina took the radio mic out of its cradle, toggled the button. “Negative. Not here, okay? Let them drive away. Tail ’em and take ’em down at the border. Over.”
“Copy that.”
“I’m going to feel like I’m arresting Gramma and Grampa,” she said to Fish.
All done, the trunk slammed shut, Van Houten handed to the old man in the tennis shorts a fat white envelope of what could only be cash, they shook hands, and the geriatric mules got back in their car.
“Guys, let’s also try to isolate the target from the women,” Tina said on the radio. “I don’t want the pregger teen subject to any potential Second Amendment nonsense when the primary realizes what’s coming down on him. Over.”
The radio just clicked its affirmative.
The Japanese sedan pulled out and hurried away, raising dust. Van Houten struck a pose, hands on hips, watching it go, engaged in some kind of discussion with the two women. He kissed them both on the mouth.
Tina winced. “Ew.”
Fish grinned. “Yeah, baby.”
Van Houten’s women opened the doors of the Land Rover to let the interior heat clear, and the gun dealer strode back to the shop door to lock up.
“Okay, showtime.”
Fish punched the accelerator to join a cavalry charge on Gun Heaven, half a dozen police and federal vehicles bearing down on the suspects in a pincer move.
Their Rover trapped, the two women tried to make a run to the building, but law enforcement was on them too fast, splitting them from Van Houten, who, defiant, had lurched into his shop and was struggling to bolt the door when Tina Z. and Fish, out of their car, hard on his heels, approached yelling, “FBI! Keep your hands away from your body! Get down on the ground! Get down on the ground!”
The pregnant teen screamed and spat when Tina raced past her. State Troopers pulled both women back to cover as Fish shouldered through the door after Van Houten and into the shop before Tina could stop him.
“Fish, wait!”
It was a typical Hazel Fish concrete cowboy move, and dumb; Fish didn’t know who or what else was inside, or how it laid out, protocol demanded a tactical approach. Besides, they had the gun dealer trapped, surrounded. Contain and control. Yeah, yeah, Fish would later say to Tina, semiapologetic, “and enough firepower in that fucking cinder-block bunker to blow us apart and hold off half a division.”
Van Houten hustled through the maze of high shelves in his shop and Fish lost track of him. Impetuous but not completely stupid, the DEA agent flopped forward and rolled to the cover of an aisle stacked with survivalist MREs, yelling back, “I’ve lost visual.” Tina came scrambling in the door behind him, staying low. “FBI! We’re FBI! Ellis Van Houten, we have a warrant for your arrest!”
She didn’t really expect a response. The world went weirdly silent. Outside, Van Houten’s shrill women were reciting all kinds of Old Testament at whoever had the misfortune of handcuffing them. Two Task Force plainclothesmen with shotguns crowded up to either side of the open door, and just as they slipped inside automatic-weapon fire began to shred the room, wild. Shelves of freeze-dried food above Fish were pulverized, a fine aromatic silt of edible nothing swirled in the shop like smoke.
Fish could see Van Houten’s reflection in a glass display case, he was hunkered in the back room doorway, pale belly flopped over his pants, wedged behind the sales counter and jamming another extended banana magazine into an AR-15 rifle. Fish popped up and laid down a pattern fire, driving the bearish man into the back room for cover.
“Hazel, we can wait him out,” Tina hissed. But Fish, who she knew would be pretty ticked off now by getting shot at, went forward, he had no other gear, a quick crabwalk on his hands and toes.
More automatic gunfire ripped the shop apart, Van Houten swinging out into the doorway and unloading half his clip. One of the shotgun cops dropped, just outside, with an astonished intake of air. His partner grabbed him and dragged him away.
Another burst from the assault rifle. Bullets sawing at the shelf cover behind which Tina had flattened herself, hoping that there was enough mass and matter between her and the shooter.
She lifted her head and looked for Fish. He was still scrambling forward. Particles glinted and swirled in sunbeams through the barred windows like whirling galaxies of stars. Van Houten put another clip into the AR and tried to locate Fish, but Tina Z. rose and squeezed off careful, measured shots that caused the fat man to flop backward again, and now she was pissed: “Hazel! C’mon. Mellow the fuck out! We don’t have to rush this.”
“Language? And the hell we don’t. No. We need to get him now. Don’t give him time to think.”
Tina said, wry, “As if thinking is going to be his strong suit.”
Fish laughed, letting off tension. With a faint “Fuck you,” Van Houten threw two aimless bursts at them, then kicked the back-room door shut so they couldn’t see him. There was the sound of his boots scuffing on the floor, the sound of cardboard tearing, the ragged wheezing of an overweight weekend warrior in full funk. Tina tried to imagine him, panicked, turning in circles. Security bars over all the windows, cops and Feds waiting outside; there was no way out.
But a trapped animal is a desperate adversary. And desperate, she knew, is deadly.
—
COLTER WAS ON him now, now, predatory, no more pretense of politeness: “You were a bad boy, Mr. Kirby, back in your private practice days.”
“Those files were sealed.”
“I don’t know what’s worse. That you settled so cheap, or that you really believe in the concept of sealing.”
“If you’ve looked at them, it’s actionable prosecutorial misconduct—”
“—A slam-dunk civil class-action case suddenly, poof, settled, just like that? With attendant murmurings of attorney misbehavior of a, well, sexual nature.” She studied him. Eyes liquid, deep enough to drown in. “Sleeping with opposing counsel? Just guessing.”
Kirby said nothing.
“I admit that I’m impressed, though, sort of. Brave man falls on his sword to shield an innocent third party, you lost your wife, you lost your job, and you got exiled to the public sector—”
“—those files are sealed” was all he could keep saying. And, yes, it scared him that she’d seen them.
“They were,” she agreed. “And you were thoroughly vetted for this job by the NSA and the FBI, and they’re trustworthy and discreet, right? So what could I possibly be talking about?”
The threat explicit.
Colter stood up and came around the table and pulled another chair uncomfortably close to him. Her knees angled over. He smelled a surge of her perfume fueled by the heat of her body.
“What spawned you?”
She ignored him, head canted, smiling. Lipstick tinted her teeth. “Two of the senior partners in your old law firm were at Yale with Senator Lindy. They like to talk. Especially they like to talk to pretty girls who work for senators, because it makes them feel potent and young. They invite you to morning prayer group and touch you lightly on the inside of your arm so the backs of their hands might brush the side of your boob, and they think for that moment they are the center of your universe and they tell you all sorts of things that might help you accomplish the tasks their friend the attorney general has given you along with the appointment that has fast-tracked your run to a federal appeals bench. Is it possible I even know the name of the third party you so heroically sacrificed yourself to protect?” She waited. Kirby’s reservoir of easy wit was empty and he had no glib answer for this. “You were a snitch,” she said, then. “That’s why you hate them.”
There was nothing he could say now to defend what he’d done, except that he didn’t regret it. He hated it, but didn’t regret it. He stayed silent.
“Would you say women are your weakness?” she asked. Colter was close enough to kiss him.
Kirby said, “I don’t know, maybe. What’s your analysis?” He thought he knew where the conversation was going.
“I’ve heard it’s a black thing.”
Kirby blinked. This was not in his file, or anywhere. How could she know?
She continued, low, intimate. “You don’t look it. You’re what, one-third? One-quarter? Octoroon? Do you even know? And”—she leaned toward him, distorted by her ambition, grotesque—“is that why . . . I mean, when it comes time to check the box on the forms, wouldn’t it have been to your advantage to check the one that comes with affirmative action? I’m . . . curious.”
If he hadn’t been so disturbed that she had this most private, intimate detail about him, he would have laughed out loud. Instead, he wanted to be anywhere but in this dull institutional cafeteria with Sabrina Colter. His breath came shallow, he felt the room recede. How did she know? It wasn’t what she was saying, and how wrong she’d gotten it, it was the violation. Nobody knew. Suddenly all he could see was her sharp little teeth and the scarlet lipstick that circled them.
In a whisper, smiling, “You want to be inside me.” Not a question.
He did, still, even with everything he now could see about her, distorted, grotesque, it didn’t matter, that much was true. It was his default. He shuddered, ashamed, and looked down at his hands.
“Is it true, what they say about black men?”
He found his voice, finally. “You’re . . . unbelievable.”
“Yeah.” She thought it was a compliment, she was unfazed. “Don’t worry, I’m color-blind. But it’s not going to happen, Gilbert, trust me on this,” she purred. “And trust that I will throw your innocent third party under the bus, unless you get me what I want.”
Kirby forced himself to look up again, to meet her cold gaze. “And you, you want . . . what?”
Her voice cut, punched, steely, into him. “Hard justice. True love. To make my mentors proud, to save myself for marriage and those mind-bending orgasms I read about in Fear of Flying. At least a couple of sweet pink babies eventually, after I make judge. A personal relationship with my Savior. And Mr. Nicholas ‘Stix’ Mahrez under our thumb, back in the fold as a reliable and ongoing confidential informant for our office in the active fraud and public corruption investigation of San Diego Mayor Richard Poole.” She took a deep breath and smiled. Her mouth that hellish mire of carnal red and bone white.
“However you choose to accomplish it,” she said, touching and sending a cold shock through him. She stood, she stretched, she sauntered out, ass rocking, tick tock, tick tock.
Kirby sat, motionless, for a couple moments, watching the empty space that she’d left in her wake; sat with hands in his pockets, legs actually trembling, then he got up, spun, screamed, and put his fist right through the glass door of the beverage refrigerator, causing the terrified counter guy to scatter his cash like confetti.
—
LISTENING TO THE MUFFLED RIPPING of cardboard and scraping footfall coming from the Gun Heaven storeroom where Van Houten had holed up, Tina Z. and Fish reloaded.
“Maybe he’s making a fort,” Tina quipped.
Fish made some minor adjustments to his legs and his body, twisting, stretching out, trying to find a more comfortable long-term solution on the floor behind the blown-out displays. “We’re giving him too much time.”
Tina called out, “Ellis? Buddy, c’mon, be realistic. Even if you make it past us, there’s a whole squad of SWAT guys outside with big guns I don’t even know the name of that they’d gladly put you down with for making them drive all the way from the city, where it’s gloomy but nice and temperate, to sweat this shadeless day out in the hot high goddamn desert.”
The back room had gone quiet. There was just a flutter of loose shot-up paper on the shelves around them when a breeze came through.
With a hand signal Tina didn’t understand, Fish hopped over the counter and slammed hard up against a cabinet near the cash register, a dozen feet from the door into the storeroom.
A SWAT sharpshooter had edged visible in the front door of the shop, with some hellacious variant of an automatic rifle rigged with every add-on his department could afford. Another SWAT cop leaned around the barred front window and smiled faintly at Tina Z., revealing braces. Red beams of their sighting lasers crisscrossed and settled on the storage room door, head high.
“Ellis?”
Tina had just begun to move forward in support of Fish when the storage room door yawned open and Van Houten filled it, wearing a Kevlar helmet and full body armor, sales tags dangling like Christmas ornaments on a moving, misshapen tree. Raising a shotgun in his gloved hands, he caused the sharpshooters to open fire, their bullets burrowing harmlessly into his protective gear, staggering him, but not before a flash bloomed from one barrel and Van Houten’s shotgun’s blast hit Tina dead center, lifted her and threw her backward onto the floor, where she puzzled over why she still hadn’t heard its deafening report, and decided she was probably dead.