Retribution

by David LaGraff

  Chapter 12

  “Let’s move out,” I said. We walked back to our van and climbed in and Johnson started the engine. I looked at the floor of the van, where the two dead guys from Johnson’s earlier encounter at Angela’s place lay stinking in their own ooze. Johnson followed my gaze.

  “Just a sec,” he said. He got out and walked to the rear of the van and pulled the two dead guys into the alley and returned to the drivers seat.

  “Might as well leave them all in one place,” he said. “It’ll be easier for the junkies to pick their pockets.”

  “I bet you straighten the magazines on the coffee table when nobody’s looking,” I said.

  The air was beginning to crisp up. He put the heater on and offered me a sip from a short dog of Cutty he’d acquired from somewhere. I took a swallow and let out a breath and became aware that I’d been holding my air, as though I was underwater.

  “Where to?” he said.

  The ancient question. Where are we going? Did anybody really know? Short of Heaven or Hell, did it really matter? I pondered this. And remembered something. A woman’s voice, a voice heavy with despair, and yet with a music that if ever it bubbled into song would be a balm for my dying soul. It was a balm I knew I must try and reach.

  “Malibu,” I said.

  “Malibu?”

  “Yeh. Let’s go out to The Colony. You probably should let your wife know you’re okay, and I wanna see Angela. Besides, I need a swim.”

  “You can’t swim in the Pacific this time of year. There’s riptides all over the place from that big storm down in Baja. Not to mention the water’s barely above fifty degrees. You’ll get sucked out a half mile and find yourself tangled up in all that kelp and shit.”

  “I’ll risk it,” I said. “It’s the only thing that’ll get this stink off.”

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “you are a little ripe. And you could at least put a shirt on. We might get arrested if some cop sees me driving a van with a naked passenger.”

  “I’ve only got one clean shirt left. If I put it on now, it’ll get all greasy from where you splattered me with that guy’s head when you blew it clean off.”

  “Put the damn shirt on. We’ll send somebody out for some fresh clothes later. You’re a piece of work, McDougal, I have to admit that. Want some advice? Next time you decide to party, wear a raincoat.”

  I put the shirt on. We hit the Hollywood Freeway and headed north, winding our way past the Capitol Records building which earmarked Hollywood before climbing through Cahuenga pass and turning east on the Ventura Freeway clover leaf northward, across the Valley and through the pass which would take us to the cutover at Malibu Canyon road. And why not? A night at the beach never hurt anybody. Not as far as I knew. And I’d never been to The Colony before, where the minimum entry bid was five million dollars. Based solely on price alone, it wasn’t the sort of place which normally hosted men such as myself. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it. There would be top shelf booze, satin sheets, pantries stocked with delicacies, and household help to answer to one’s varied whims. A welter of new situations for me to face. Normally, facing new situations was cause for concern for anybody. But it was all a matter of attitude. To succeed in life, my Granny used to tell me, one must learn to adjust. Tonight I would soon be in residence somewhere in The Colony.

  There’d be a lot of adjusting to do. For example, I’d have to adjust to the local native diet, which consisted mostly of nuts and fruits. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have any Big Macs for me to eat. And their pillows would be too soft. These things were but some of my initial petty concerns. Overshadowed by the hope that I’d be able to see Angela once more, and put myself close to that golden voice and proud bearing. So I put my worries away because somewhere, way deep down, I knew I’d find a way to handle the quick, albeit temporary degrading of my lifestyle. In fact, I felt certain I’d give a good accounting of myself.

  To while away the time, I decided to look into the bag I’d just purloined from the dead guy in the green jogging suit. Which was when I made an important discovery.

  “Pull off the freeway and find a place to park for a minute,” I said. We exited the Ventura Freeway at Balboa and soon found ourselves in the parking lot adjacent to the Balboa Park tennis courts. The courts were brightly lit against a backdrop of upscale apartment complexes which attracted the kind of spiritually vapid people who’d been brainwashed at the local colleges, made decent salaries, played a little tennis during the week, cooked up a test tube baby now and then, and party’d a bit too much on weekends. Tonight there were few players playing. From the relaxed quality of their play, I guessed there weren’t many in the bunch who’d had a rocket grenade fired into their living room any time in the past couple of hours.

  “We’re being tracked,” I said.

  “Say again?”

  “Poon has some sort of tracking device in his vans. There’s a hand-held GPS monitor in this bag. The featured location is our van, right here in Balboa park.”

  “We’re being tracked right now. Ouch.”

  “That’s how they found my apartment so quickly. When I parked the van in the alley, the GPS tracker led them right to me.”

  Johnson nodded. “Which means it wasn’t a junky who stole the van from your place.”

  “Right,” I said. “It was one of Poon’s men who took it. They drove it away in spite of the fact it had two flat front tires. They did it to extract their buddy, Nose.”

  “Not to mention they removed it so it couldn’t be connected with what they had planned next, which was blowing up your apartment with you in it.”

  I nodded. Johnson was still thinking like a cop. I wasn’t thinking at all, and it showed. It was part of the price tag paid for jumping into an operation without planning anything in advance. I cursed myself. In times past, I might have spent days, weeks even, meticulously gathering the information necessary to carry off a successful mission. But this time, enraptured by a woman, and enraged by the death of a friend, I had simply reacted with my gut, and thrown myself to what was turning out to be a very powerful wolf indeed.

  “You’re a sloppy shit, aren’t you?” Johnson said.

  “Yeh. But I don’t notice your detecting skills to be all that much either.”

  “I’m slipping,” Johnson said. “I should have realized he’d have some sort of tracking on his vehicles. All the best drug dealers are using global tracking nowadays. It’s not like it was in the old days, when Captain America kept the stuff hidden in his teardrop gas tank. Nowadays, most self-respecting drug dealers have better shipment tracking and on-time delivery than Fed-Ex.”

  “I think Lenny Poon’s probably a little pissed off by today’s events,” I said.

  “More than likely. Losing a son and six members of his crew in a single afternoon might have something to do with his mood being somewhat less than ethereal. Especially right before the weekend he hosts Gorbachev.”

  “We have one small advantage,” I said.

  “Which is?”

  “They don’t know we know about the tracking device.”

  “It’s a start,” he said.