TINA Z. WAS DOWN. As still as a drowning pool. Her handgun had spilled away from her, out into the open where there was no way she could retrieve it, even if Fish had believed she was capable of doing so, which, in the mayhem of the moment, he didn’t.
He was pissed at himself for letting it happen.
He saw the second muzzle flash of the shotgun shell that chewed apart the side window wood and caused that SWAT sharpshooter to disappear in a blur of debris. The SWAT gunman in the front doorway emptied a whole magazine, but still Van Houten stayed upright, dropping the shotgun and swinging a short-stock Kalashnikov up on its strap, into the crook of his arm, and raking the front wall, sending the doorway shooter stumbling back out into the dust of the yard.
The air reeked of cordite and burned wood and drywall dust and oily smoke. Fish lunged out into the ether from his cabinet cover and fired point-blank, the cumulative impact of the bullets striking Kevlar and tilting the fat man back into a shattered gun cabinet, where he braced himself and began to turn his automatic on Fish, now fully exposed, still five feet short of his destination, surely to kill him.
And Fish thought: Tina is right about me.
But Tina Z. was up on her feet, and moving, Fishlike; he watched, amazed, as she leapt unarmed onto Van Houten’s back and locked her arms together around his shoulders and neck in a choke hold and would not let go.
Bullets from the Kalashnikov sprayed everywhere: Fish was able to drop, burrow, disappear under a collapsing shelf, a punctured water pipe spewing fountains of mist up through the shredded floorboard, the Feds and cops outside the shop running for cover as bullets popped through the clapboard walls and peppered the surrounding vehicles like hailstones.
The gun dealer whirled, roaring, and slammed Tina Z. back into the wall, pinning her there, groping breathless for a silvery shaft of KA-BAR combat knife he conjured from the folds of his body armor, clutched with thick-fingered gloved hands, and clumsily began to stab wildly back at Tina. Her grasp slipped, he gulped air. Fish, hands and knees, groped for his weapon, and saw through the smoke and water mist Tina clawing at Van Houten’s face as the fat man kept thrusting the knife at her—saw her hands find his forehead, grip and tip it back from the Velcro neck guard of his armored suit—
—to expose the pink unprotected flesh of his neck.
Fish aimed and pulled the trigger of his gun.
The barrel spat fire and it kicked hard.
Van Houten’s head jerked once as a bullet went in through his chin and up through his skull and smacked against the Kevlar helmet’s underside and all the distorted bits and pieces of it rebounded back down through his brain, whereupon he toppled over and onto Tina Z., already dead before the two of them found the floor.
“Get him off me! Get him off me!”
It took Fish and two SWAT guys to dislodge the huge body so she could wriggle free from under it.
“Ow,” Tina complained, coughing. Her eyes betrayed a terror to which she would never admit.
“Fuck,” Fish said.
Tina blinked back hot tears.
The others were pouring in now, SWAT and Feds, their weapons rattling, shoes and boots beating a dirge on the floor. Fish helped Tina up.
Admiringly: “You are a crazy-ass chick.” But he was shaking.
“Fish. You okay?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” She looked in his eyes and saw through the bravado to the man who had just taken a life.
“First time?” she asked quietly. But they were surrounded now, men pounding Hazel Fish on the back and admiring the kill. He smiled strangely.
She let it go and gathered. “Hey. Do you know how much paperwork this is gonna mean?” Tina Z. said, pretending to be exasperated, and not wanting to think, even for a moment, about what she’d just been through.
Fish, jacked in his adrenaline daze, drank the ensuing carnival in: Tina Z., the dead gun dealer, the shot-up store, the smell of spent weapons, the comforting blur of his brothers in arms, din of voices, fountain of tap water spraying, puddling.
The exhilaration of being alive.
“Sorry,” he said to her finally, meaning it, but unable to dim his grin. It felt unseemly; it felt earned. Much later, after the OIS team arrived to take his gun and his statement and drive him back to the city for all the required officer-involved-shooting protocols, the full weight of taking a life would press down on him. And, alone, he would cry.
Miraculously, none of the SWAT team or support personnel had been hurt; the one sharpshooter had taken a round in his vest, Tina Z. felt like she’d been kicked by an elephant, a few others suffered minor cuts from flying glass and debris.
They searched the body and found keys, ChapStick, loose change, a money roll instead of a wallet, the ubiquitous pager, some loose pills, a thin little flip-top pocket tin containing a driver’s license, NRA membership, ATM and some business cards that Fish fanned out to discover, among them, leathered and well-thumbed, one with the U.S. Marines insignia embossed and a contact name and phone number for Sgt. Albert Zappacosta.
On the back were figures and serial numbers scrawled in Bert’s childish cursive. Prices and product.
Tina Z. reached for it. Her worried gaze found Fish. He didn’t stop her from taking the card and slipping it into the pocket of her jeans, and he didn’t bring it up when they were tallying the gun dealer’s personal inventory, or, the next day, in the detailed recounting of the attempted arrest, the shooting, and its aftermath.
It would be a secret they shared. Not quite the one he wanted, but enough, she guessed.
—
KIRBY HAD TO MAKE the high desert drive during rush hour, with a swollen hand and the bandaged knuckles tender, but the X-ray was negative and he hadn’t needed stitches. Nobody asked why he’d punched a fridge. By the time he got to the crime scene it was crawling with news vans and on-air talent, and his jaw was sore from having clenched it for the duration of the grinding gridlock he’d endured.
First thing when she saw him, Tina Z. told Kirby she had a bruise on her chest that she swore in quiet confidence had turned the inside of her breasts sickly Easter-egg colors already, “purple and yellow and pink striating right to the nipple,” and she offered to show him but he demurred, for now, although it did strangely stir him. (“I’m impressed,” he teased, “you even know what ‘striating’ means.”) But the whole exchange felt forced, her eyes were empty, distant, as if she were in two places at once, and he was still reeling from Sabrina Colter.
Kirby deflected when she asked about his hand, skirted Fish’s lively and already embellished retelling of the takedown for anyone who was foolish enough to listen, and went instead into the ruined gun shop where the body of Van Houten was being zipped into a vinyl bag by the coroner’s crew, and an underfed criminalist wearing flip-down magnifying glasses was attempting with little success to breach the floor safe in the back room.
Arrows of evening sunlight stabbed through the ragged bullet holes in the walls of the building and left odd shadows and hot spots on the mad shambles of ruin inside. A moth-eaten old California Republic bear flag covered one wall, there was a shattered, framed dime-store copy of the Declaration of Independence and an high school GED certificate and snapshots and Polaroids of well-fed white men like Van Houten dolled up in camo and shooting guns. A cardboard range target, with a nicely clustered firing pattern grouped in the silhouettes of two running figures wearing sombreros (man and boy), had fallen to the floor.
A strange shroud of defeat was trying to settle on Kirby. Even if his drug sting didn’t dead-end with the gun dealer, the encounter with Colter had so unnerved and unraveled him, he was going through the motions now, gutted, all his talk of making a difference and getting the bad guys, of serving the People, soured. He didn’t want to give up, but also didn’t want to face that maybe he’d lost the fight before it ever began, that maybe his whole career as a prosecutor was a Promethean joke: whack-a-mole: catch one bad guy, another one popped up. Flip one informant and he gives you another, flip that one and on to the next, over and over and over, the little lies compounding, everybody desperate to protect themselves, all the way up to the top, where, depending on which way the political winds blow, something happens or something doesn’t, but Kirby had no say in it, just a foot soldier, a fucking foot soldier, following orders, fooled by the patriotic patter of sophomore civics class, the illusion of rule of law. The world had slipped out from under him while he wasn’t looking, and he was standing on nothing but air, Wile E. Coyote, about to plummet into the chasm and make his angry puff of existential dust.
After a while, Kirby went back out to confer with Tina and Fish about how they might best deal with Van Houten’s women, who were presently handcuffed and glaring at them from the back of a patrol car, their high hair somewhat deflated, the gravity-defying bangs flayed and down in their eyes.
“Wives,” Fish said.
“His? Both of them?”
“That is an affirmative.”
“They belong to some kind of eccentric apocalyptic survivalist church,” Tina Z. elaborated. “Cosmic something. They just keep spewing gospel at us.”
“And, word to the wise,” Fish chimed in, “they don’t use deodorant and they don’t shave their pits.”
“Guns—owning, oiling, buying, selling, stealing if necessary, and, oh, yeah, shooting—seems to be central to their beliefs,” Tina continued. “Hating government. Driving around the desert in ATVs. They won’t be much help,” she added. “I’ve tried to turn these religious types before. They all want to be martyred.”
Kirby nodded. “A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who tells lies will not escape,” he said. Off the agents’ puzzled frowns: “Proverbs.”
“You’re an atheist,” Tina Z. reminded him.
“Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal faithfully are His delight.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“No, Proverbs again. There was this one semester in college when I flirted with the idea of becoming an Episcopal minister.”
Fish asked what had changed Kirby’s mind.
“I got a C on the final. Only C I’ve ever gotten,” Kirby admitted. “It was a sign from God.” He looked to what was left of the sun, bleeding out over the western horizon.
“You okay?” He said it to both of them, meant it for Tina Z. She didn’t look at him. Fish squared shoulders, spat, and continued to pretend it’d been nothing.
“How come OIS hasn’t sequestered you?” Kirby asked.
“They got lost. Still twenty minutes away.”
Kirby looked at Tina. “Somebody here should have put him in a car and sat with him. He’s not supposed to talk to anybody until he gives his statement.” He knew he didn’t need to tell them this, and Tina and Fish each made insincere gestures of resignation: Oh well.
“We tagged and bagged his gun.”
“Suits concerned with covering Uncle Sam’s fat ass.”
Kirby nodded. “Let’s get these sinners back to our sanctuary.”
Another ninety-minute drive to the Federal Building. Kirby planned to just let his mind go blank.
—
“WHEN’D YOU GET married?”
They’d split the suspects, put them in adjacent interview rooms, and flipped a coin. Tina Z. took tails, lost, and got the younger one, the ferret-faced seventeen-year-old who kept spitting on anyone within range. She refused to tell them her name; they were running her prints.
“I got a vinyl Chargers rain poncho in my trunk,” Fish had offered before the suits took him away. “And a can of Bactine.”
“That’s not funny. Shut up,” Tina Z. had said. She was thinking, again, about Bert.
So the exhausted FBI agent and the defiant, pregnant teen faced each other across a scratched metal table in the Federal Building. Tina had put more than an average expectorating distance between them. There was a mirrored window behind which Tina could feel Kirby’s eyes, watching. She repeated her question about marriage, trying to ease her way into the tougher ones, but the girl hissed:
“That’s between me and my Lord.”
“Okay.”
“You’re violating my First Amendment.”
Tina just ignored this and went straight at it: “Who hired your husband to blow up Nick Mahrez?”
“The Ventriloquist,” the girl said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what they call him. I dunno. My husband don’t speak to me about his work.”
“Oh. They?”
“It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and vexing woman.”
“Ah. Hmm.”
“I’m not to speak in church.”
Tina felt adrift. “The woman we arrested with you—”
“Wife. Also, yes.” She looked darkly at Tina Z. “Judge not lest ye be judged.” The teen forced a laugh. Her teeth were brown and broken, ravaged by what Tina assumed to be a crack addiction. Shivering, tweaking, and defiant. “Everything’s in the Bible,” she said.
“Having two wives?”
“Yes.”
“Where?” Tina asked, sincerely interested.
The young girl blinked. Maybe she didn’t know.
“Never mind, I can check with the assistant U.S. attorney, Mr. Kirby seems to be fluent in your language.”
The pregnant teen tensed and straightened her spine to spit, but Tina Z. had already flipped her notepad up to shield herself, annoyed mostly by the fact that this meant later she’d have to transcribe all her notes into a clean one.
—
“SOMEBODY GAVE YOUR HUSBAND a contract to kill Nick Mahrez,” a ruddy, plump FBI desk jockey with crumbs on his meager beard was prompting the other wife, in the other room, when Kirby came in, ID lanyard slung crooked over his loosened tie like a checkmark.
“I want a lawyer. Don’t I get a lawyer?”
The agent and this older woman were side by side in chairs, like old friends. Her eyes were red from crying, her hands twisted in her lap. Her dirt-blackened chapped feet were strapped into sandals and swollen like old salmon.
“I want a lawyer.”
“You’re in luck,” the agent said. “Here’s a lawyer right now. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kirby, meet . . .” The agent didn’t know her name, but Kirby couldn’t recall the G-man’s, either, and marveled that the bearded agent had found a doughnut in the Federal Building at this hour. Maybe he kept some in his desk.
Nothing from the wife. Her face blank. Kirby pulled a chair around and opened his file.
“Barbara Van Houten. Spouse. No priors.”
“I meant a lawyer for me,” the woman said.
The federal agent nodded. “I’m sorry, I misunderstood.”
The wife ignored him. “I don’t have to talk to you,” she said to Kirby.
“No, you don’t. But, me, I can talk all I want. You need anything? Coffee? Water?” He looked at the agent and the agent looked back at him and Kirby added, “Doughnut?” while giving a silent signal that now would be a good time for the bearded Fed to take a break.
Nothing from the wife. Kirby waited.
The agent sighed and heaved up out of his chair and shuffled out mumbling as if he was pissed off by something.
“The pregnant girl—” Kirby began.
“—Sister-wife.”
Kirby grinned, bemused. “You really call her that?”
“Yes.”
“You got your own children somewhere we should be worrying about?”
The wife tensed, tangled her fingers. Kirby took this to mean not just “no” but “not possible.” The Lord giveth, he thought to himself, and then sometimes he doesn’t.
“Bedtime’s gotta be awkward. I mean—”
“We share him. It’s in the scriptures.”
“Oh, uh-huh, well, that solves everything.” And Kirby observed that pretty much anything was in the Bible, if you looked hard enough.
“It’s in the Bible,” Barbara Van Houten repeated sharply. This seemed to be the default position for both wives.
“But not, technically, legal,” he said. “In the State of California. Plus there’s the statutory rape thing, to which you would appear to be an accessory.”
“There are man’s laws, and God’s laws.”
Kirby processed this. “Who paid Ellis to kill Mahrez? Man or God?”
“Man who thinks he’s God,” she murmured. “Putting words in other people’s mouths.”
“Juan Blanco?”
The wife stared at her hands, jaw tight. “I don’t have to talk to you.”
For a long time she didn’t. Kirby waited, patient. He wasn’t much interested in arresting her, and whatever crimes she was guilty of—by her own accounting—she’d answer for in the next life, so the legality of his lingering after she asked for counsel didn’t worry him.
“Did your husband tell you that he fucked up and killed a woman? Blew her into pieces.”
The FBI agent came back with a bottle of water, a cup of coffee, and, yes, two sugar doughnuts. “Sister-wife’s got a freebasing problem,” the agent quipped. “She’s down the hall doing jumping jacks without even getting up.”
Barbara Van Houten rolled her eyes. “You think?”
Kirby saw the opening and bored down on her: “Let me guess. She came to church to score some white salvation from your husband, Ellis, high desert lay minister and gun guru and crack procurer—fell behind on her payments, she was easy on the eyes, Ellis took it out in trade. Certain vestments removed. Holy fluids exchanged. All those freedom-loving sperm swimming on. Knocked her up. You yourself can’t have children, but: Polygamy! Hallelujah! God’s will be done. A win-win-win.”
The wife began crying again, pulling her clenched hands to her lips.
“How am I doing?”
“I want a lawyer.”
Having hit the nerve, Kirby pressed harder. “Here’s the deal, Barbara: The girl’s a crack addict, possible accessory to murder, they’ll take the baby away from her the minute it’s born. Social Services will find a foster home for it, but unless we have a witness to tell us how involved she might have been, sister-wife will do but a couple quick years in juvie, clean herself up, get out, request custody, take her little baby back on the street with her, and God help—”
“SHUT UP!” Everything went quiet. “Shut up.” The wife sobbed.
Kirby felt nothing; he needed a snitch, this was the easier turn. “You loved him.”
No response.
“You’re Ellis’s wife. Of legal standing, I mean. And it’s his biological child. You could petition for and probably get custody . . . if you’re not sitting in jail, too, while we slow-boat your case through the federal courts.”
Again, he waited. He had all the time in the world. The deal implicit. Eventually the wife looked up. He was sure she was going to. Feeling generous because the man had shared doughnuts, Kirby tilted his head toward the bearded agent, allowing him to have the privilege.
And the agent asked, “Who hired your husband to kill Mahrez?”
Once Barbara started talking, they discovered, it was hard to get her to shut up.
—
“IT WAS JUAN BLANCO. Both wives have made sworn statements.”
The Gun Heaven safe had contained money and documents—more than twenty grand, Kirby told Colter—along with, he added, a lot of half-assed federal gun law paperwork, evidence of tax evasion encouraged by antigovernment nativist groups, a commendation from the John Birch Society, neo-Nazi pamphlets, and a plastic flip-top container filled with floppy disks that contained enough names, dates, and transactions to indict and extradite Juan Blanco from Tijuana for contract killing, extortion, drug trafficking, and several dozen RICO violations.
He had walked into her office fifteen minutes short of midnight, not surprised to find her still working, soft-lit by the desk lamp, using large-framed reading glasses he’d never seen before and which she removed and put away and pretended she hadn’t been wearing.
“But the hit man himself is dead.”
“Van Houten? Pretty much. It was a clean shoot. Agent Fish has already been processed and sent home.” He dropped the file on her desk and pinned it there with the box of floppies. “However, this, along with the witness depositions, should be plenty.”
She just looked at the case file blankly. “We can’t touch Blanco,” she said simply. Lamplight bounced off her desk, glazed her eyes, like a cat, and made them incandescent when she looked up at him again. “What about your local facilitator? I thought that was the whole focus of this investigation.”
Comparing notes after the interview, Tina told Kirby what the pregnant tweaker had said, about a ventriloquist. Putting it together with Barbara’s rambling, elliptical statements, Kirby assumed this was a sly reference to Blanco running a puppet on the American side of the border. He had a ready answer:
“We’ll get him from Blanco. Or a search of Blanco’s files and records.”
Now she was dismissive. “He’s a foreign national, an elected official. You know that. The politics of it are impossible. But congratulations on solving two murders.”
“Yeah, yeah, happy endings all around.” He allowed a pause, full of irony, he hoped, because: “Except, let’s see, Stix Mahrez . . . and his girlfriend . . . and the bodyguard, Emilio, whose nibbles and bits our lab crims are still picking up from a three-block radius, but hey. Wages of war, right? Congratulations to you, ‘sir.’ Don’t forget to mention the close cooperation between local law enforcement, the DEA, and the FBI in your press conference tomorrow.”
Colter was utterly unmoved.
“What I’ve always loved,” Kirby said, unable to contain his bitterness, “about this job is how, every day, I could count on pursuing my case using my best judgment without having to get the approval of or listen to the opinion of some calculating individual with hidden agendas. I mean, the United States is my client. It never contradicts me or tries to force me to do things that do not have its best interests at heart.” There was emotion in his voice that surprised even him. Colter rocked back in her chair, away from the desk lamp, her face suddenly lost in shadows, her hands in her lap.
Kirby said, still wanting to believe it, “This is what we do—we catch bad guys. We find them, we catch them, we put them away. And we’re good at it. And that’s the job I signed up for and that’s all I’m asking from you now—”
“—And you call me naïve.”
There was nothing more to say then, and they just studied each other, from opposite, shadowed sides of the bright pool of light.
And Colter touched the nape of her neck. Brought it down over her breasts lightly as her hand fell to the desk.
She exhaled slowly, as if spent. “That was good for me. How about you?”