The First Rule

by Robert Crais

  Cole said, “This is a clusterfuck.”

  “Here comes Walsh.”

  An SRT wagon appeared at the far turn, followed by several unmarked cars.

  Pike turned to look for Jakovich just as two men ran into the building. The first man was Michael Darko. He stopped just inside the door, saw Jakovich, and shot him. He ran closer, and shot him twice more. He shouted something in Serbian, and shot Jakovich a fourth time. Then he saw Pike, and Michael Darko gave a big smile.

  “We got this bastard. You had a good plan.”

  He would have stood over Frank Meyer exactly like that. Pike saw him shooting Frank in exactly the same way.

  Pike raised his gun, and shot the man who had run in with Darko. Darko stood slack-jawed for a moment, as if he didn’t understand, then lifted his gun and fired.

  Pike pushed Cole out, and followed, ducking behind the big door as the SRT teams identified themselves over their P.A. systems and demanded that everyone surrender. Two or three might have surrendered, but the gunfire continued.

  Cole said, “He’s out the side door. He’s running.”

  Darko.

  Pike ran hard along the front of the building through the chaos of the fight. The SRT operators and arriving ATF agents were spreading along a perimeter, taking men into custody.

  Pike ran past them.

  He reached the corner of the building, and saw Darko halfway down its length, far beyond the action. Pike started after him. Darko suddenly turned toward the street. He saw Pike following, and popped off two shots, but Pike didn’t slow.

  Darko ran across the street, jumped high onto the chain-link fence, and clawed his way over. He dropped into the sandy brush, staggered to his feet, and fired three more shots. One of his bullets sparked off the tarmac at Pike’s feet, but Pike kept running.

  He heard Kelly Walsh shouting behind him.

  “Stop it, Pike! You stop! He’s mine!”

  Pike ignored her.

  He hit the fence at a hard run, and crashed down into dead scrub that tore into his skin. Pike couldn’t see Darko or hear him, so he traced the fence until he found the spot where Darko climbed over. The signs were easy to follow, even as Hurwitz’s voice echoed over the P.A.

  “Stand down, Pike. We are moving into the area. We’ll get him. Now stand down.”

  Pike picked up his pace.

  The footprints and trail scuffs led up a low rise, then down into a depression overgrown with chaparral and sage. Pike pushed through the hard scrub, so thick and dense he was unable to see anything except the ground at his feet.

  The chaparral thinned as the ground rose, and tabled out into a small clearing. Darko’s footprints continued across. Pike paused to scan the far side of the rise for movement. Ballona Creek was visible about three hundred yards ahead. It was a wide creek with concrete walls, and a current that pushed to the sea. They were very close to the ocean. If Darko made it to the creek, there was a good chance he could escape.

  Pike set off across the clearing, pushing even faster.

  Pike was less than halfway across when Michael Darko exploded from a ball of chaparral, and crashed into him. He had circled back to wait in the brush, and had done a good job of it.

  Darko was a heavy man, and strong, but Pike spun with the contact and pushed him past. Darko staggered sideways, then caught his balance. He was winded and out of shape, and breathing hard to show it. He wasn’t holding a gun. Dropped it, fighting his way through the brush.

  Pike said, “No gun?”

  Darko stared at Pike’s gun, still sucking wind like a bellows.

  Pike tossed the pistol to the ground at Darko’s feet.

  “How about now?”

  Darko dropped for the gun. His hand was on the grip when Pike hit him with a roundhouse kick that snapped his humerus like a wet stick. He made a deep grunt, then Pike caught him from the other side on the outside of his knee, and swept his legs from under him. Darko landed on his side, then rolled onto his back.

  The pistol was next to him, but Darko made no move for it.

  Pike was staring at him when the brush moved, and Elvis Cole stepped out. Cole took in the scene, then moved a little closer.

  “You got him. We’re done here, Joe.”

  Pike picked up the gun. He held it with a relaxed grip and jiggled it, still looking at Darko.

  Cole said, “You good?”

  Pike didn’t know if he was good or not. He thought maybe he was, but wasn’t sure.

  Cole said, “It’s over.”

  More crashing came up the hill, then Walsh burst into the clearing. She had her service piece, and immediately beaded up on Pike.

  “Put it down! Move away from him and put it down, Pike. Do it!”

  Pike jiggled the gun again.

  Cole slowly stepped between them, putting himself in front of her gun.

  “Take it easy, Walsh. We’re cool.”

  She angled sideways to see her target.

  “He’s mine, goddamnit! You step away from there, Pike! That bastard is mine!”

  Pike tossed the little pistol toward her. It landed in the sand.

  Pike glanced down at Darko again, but saw Frank and Cindy. Frank, Cindy, and their two little boys.

  Cole stepped up beside him, and put a hand on Pike’s shoulder.

  “We’re done. You got him.”

  Pike followed his friend out of the brush.

  Part Five

  Rest

  45

  CINDY’S SISTER ARRANGED THE memorial. She did not know Pike, Jon Stone, or Frank’s friends from that earlier time, so Pike was not invited. Cole saw a notice for the memorial when he read the Meyer family’s obituary. The obituary was published as a sidebar to a longer article in the Los Angeles Times about East European gang wars, the death of Milos Jakovich, and the conviction and sentencing of Michael Darko to three consecutive life sentences for the murders of Earvin Williams, Jamal Johnson, and Samuel Renfro, as well as the murders they committed on Darko’s behalf. Darko did not stand trial. He accepted a plea agreement that let him escape the death penalty. The obituary noted that a memorial for the Meyers would be held at the United Methodist church in Westwood on an upcoming Sunday.

  Cole pointed out the memorial.

  “You should go.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pike told Jon Stone about it, and asked if he would go, but Stone refused, not because he didn’t care about Frank, but because he hated funerals. They made him depressed, and he always showed up drunk.

  Pike decided to go. He wore a black suit over a black shirt and black silk tie. Frank, Cindy, Little Frank, and Joey were represented by poster-sized photographs set up on easels, along with an enormous blowup of a family portrait.

  The people in attendance were mostly Cindy’s family, but a significant number were people who knew the Meyers from school, their business, and church. Two cousins from Frank’s side showed up, both listless men with scabbed hands and coarse skin who looked like they worked hard for a living. They attended only because they brought Frank’s mother—an overweight woman of meager means who had difficulty walking. She sat in a front pew with the two awkward cousins as if she was out of place, and knew it. Her clothes were cheap, and her hair was bad, and when the memorial was over she would go back to her trailer in San Bernardino.

  Pike introduced himself, and shook her hand.

  “Frank was my friend. We were in the service together.”

  “This is so terrible. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “I’m sorry about your son.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Pike shook other hands. When people asked, he told them he knew Frank from the service, but didn’t say where or when, and provided no details. These people knew the Frank they wanted to know, and the Frank that Frank and Cindy wanted them to know. Pike was fine with it.

  Pike left in the middle of the service, and drove to Frank’s house. The yellow tape was
down, and someone had replaced the broken front door. A For Sale sign had sprouted on the front lawn.

  Pike took off his jacket and tie, then rolled his sleeves. He let himself through the side gate, walked around to the back, then stood beneath the huge maple tree beside the still pool. The relatives would be through the house soon, dividing and sharing the mementos, deciding what to do with the possessions. Pike went to the French doors, but did not enter. He had what he wanted. He peered into Frank’s house, then faced the pool and the trees. It was easy to imagine Frank tossing his sons in the air, but imagining it didn’t make him hurt less.

  Pike returned to his Jeep, and turned toward the ocean. He followed Sunset Boulevard west, through Brentwood and the Palisades to the Pacific Coast Highway, then up the coast toward Malibu. The ocean was gray, and crowded with sailboats and surfers, come out on the weekend to play.

  Pike turned up into Malibu Canyon, and drove for a while, leaving the people and houses behind. He found a gravel fire road, and drove until he came to a bluff deep in the hills with no one else around. Pike shut off his Jeep, then got out and stood on the earth.

  One night four men Frank Meyer did not know and to whom he had no connection entered his home. They killed Frank, his family, and everything he held dear. Frank was left with nothing except how he lived, and how he died.

  Frank Meyer’s fingerprints were found on Earvin “Moon” Williams’s pistol. A postmortem examination of Williams’s elbow revealed that the ulnar collateral ligament was ruptured, along with cracks in both the ulna and radius in the forearm. The break in the radius bone was of the “green wood” variety, and damaged the surrounding tissue so severely that blood pooled in the joint until the time of Williams’s death. This was how Pike wanted to remember his friend. Chubby, out of shape, and a dozen years out of the game, Frank had moved to defend his family, engaged a superior force, and lost his life in the effort. Frank the Tank to the end.

  Pike returned to the Jeep and opened a gun case on the backseat. He took out his pistol and three speed-loaders, two of which were already charged with six bullets, and one which was only half loaded.

  Pike raised the Python, fired six times, then reloaded. He fired six more shots, reloaded, then did it again, and finally a last time, firing only three shots. Twenty-one shots, in all.

  “Good-bye, Frank.”

  Pike put his gun away, and drove the long road home.

  46

  THREE WEEKS LATER, one day after they removed the cast from his arm, Michael Darko scowled at the flat, dry fields as they approached Corcoran, California, and thought, This must be the far side of the moon. Darko was surprised that morning when he was herded onto a bus and told he was being relocated to Corcoran State Prison. Darko had spent the past two weeks at Terminal Island, a federal facility he thought would be his home for the next many years. He asked why he was being transferred, but no one offered an answer.

  Another inmate on the ride up told him Corcoran was a very bad place with many dangerous people, but now, after four hours in the bus and seeing the prison in the distance, Darko was not so much scared that this place would be dangerous, but disappointed because it was ugly.

  After what he had known in Bosnia, American prisons and American prisoners did not frighten him, just as American policemen did not frighten him. Michael Darko had come from a dangerous place, and was, himself, a dangerous man.

  Even as the prison grew in the van’s dusty windows, Darko was planning to establish contact with other East European inmates, and forge relationships with the Aryan Brotherhood. Many of these associations were already in place, and would be useful in building an empire.

  Ten minutes later, the van entered the facility through a rolling gate, then drove into a small parking area where several guards waited. Darko and the two inmates sharing the ride had to wait for the guards to enter the van and unlock them. Each of the three were wearing hand and ankle restraints, and had been locked to separate seats well out of reach of each other. This was done because violent inmates often tried to kill, maim, fornicate with, and sometimes eat each other on the long drive up to nowhere.

  The guards entered the van one by one, unhooked an inmate, and walked him off—one guard per inmate. Darko was taken off last. He gave his guard a merciless leer.

  “Home, sweet home! It is a beautiful place, is it not?”

  The guard had seen tough-guy swagger before, and paid no attention.

  The three new inmates were herded through the admitting process. They were stripped, searched, probed, and X-rayed, then were fingerprinted, photographed, and had a DNA sample removed and recorded. They were sprayed with de-louser, made to shower, and given new clothes and shoes. The clothes and shoes they were wearing when they arrived were discarded. The allowable possessions transferred with them were inspected, logged into their records, and returned.

  The admission process took forty minutes, during which the chief guard-of-the-watch lectured them on the dos and don’ts of Corcoran, read them a set of written rules, and issued their housing assignments.

  Michael Darko was assigned a cell in Level Three Housing, a facility for homicidal offenders capable of self-restraint. Two guards walked him to his new home, turned him over to yet more guards, who processed him into their facility. He was then given fresh bedding, and led to his cell.

  He arrived during the afternoon break, a time at which the cells on the main block were open, and main block prisoners were allowed to mingle in the common areas.

  The two guards brought Darko to his cell and pointed out a sheet-less bunk.

  “This side. Your bunkie’s a brother named Nathaniel Adama-bey. Calls himself a Moor. He’s in for two homicides, but he ain’t so bad.”

  “I am sure we will become great friends.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  The guards left, and Darko turned to his bunk. He unrolled the mattress, straightened it, then picked up his sheet. It was coarse, and stiff with plenty of starch. Darko hated making a bed, and wished he had one of his whores to take care of it. Then he chuckled. Maybe he would make this Nathaniel Adama-bey his whore, and then Nathaniel could do it.

  Darko unfolded the sheet, and shook it into the air to open it. The sheet billowed out, and floated for a moment like a great white bubble. The bubble was still in the air when Michael Darko slammed face-first into the wall, breaking his nose. Then an arm as hard as steel locked around his throat, and something stung his back like an angry wasp, low on his side over his kidney—stickstickstick, stickstickstick, stickstickstick—a sharp pricking that happened too fast to hurt, and moved from his side to his ribs—stickstickstick, stickstickstick.

  Michael Darko tried to rise, but the man kept him off balance—stickstickstick—until a hissing, hot breath scalded his ear.

  “Don’t die yet, not yet.”

  Darko was flipped over. He saw a short Asian man with tremendous shoulders and arms, whose face was dimpled with scars as if from horrible wounds. Michael Darko tried to raise his hands, but couldn’t. He tried to defend himself, but was beyond all that. The man’s arm moved as furiously as a needle on a sewing machine—stickstickstick, stickstickstick—punching Darko in the chest with an ice pick.

  Michael Darko watched himself being killed.

  The man suddenly grabbed Darko’s face, and leaned close with his rage, close enough for a kiss.

  “You’re gonna meet Frank Meyer, you piece of shit. Tell’m Lonny sends his love.”

  The man shoved the ice pick hard into Darko’s chest, all the way to the hilt, and abruptly walked away.

  Michael Darko looked down at the handle, protruding from his chest. He wanted to pull it out, but his hands wouldn’t move. Darko slid off his bunk into his sheet, and the folds draped over him like a shawl. His back and chest felt as if ants were migrating under his skin, and seemed to be swelling. Darko tried to call for help, but could not find the breath. He could not breathe. He felt light-headed, and cold, and afraid.
<
br />   The white sheet grew red.

  47

  TRAFFIC AT A STANDSTILL. Late afternoon. Someone lost control of his vehicle, and now the southbound 405 was a parking lot. Kelly Walsh didn’t mind. Windows up, AC blowing, the horns outside muted. CD player. She touched the replay button, and the backup singers began their soothing riff—dum, dum, dum, dundee, doo-wah—and Roy Orbison kissed her heart with longing and pain.

  Only the lonely.

  Walsh had listened to the song four times in a row, and was now on her fifth; trapped on the stalled freeway in a cocoon of melancholy.

  Walsh missed him terribly, Special Agent Jordan Brant, killed in the line of duty, one of her guys, and could not escape the guilt that she had failed him, then, and even now.

  Michael Darko had cut a deal, which meant there had been no trial. Walsh knew she should be happy, but Jordie Brant’s wife lost the chance to confront her husband’s killer, and Walsh herself lost the righteous vengeance of offering the testimony to nail Darko’s conviction. The lack of closure left her feeling as if Jordie remained unavenged, and that she had somehow failed him again. And lost him again.

  They’re gone forever.

  Sitting there, listening to Roy, her cell phone buzzed. Walsh checked the incoming ID, then stopped the music to answer.

  “Kelly Walsh.”

  “Have you heard?”

  “I get promoted?”

  “Better. Michael Darko was murdered.”

  Walsh was caught off guard and left feeling surprised. She had expected this call sooner or later, but not this soon, and not today. A mixture of warmth and fear blossomed in her belly.

  She said, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  “These things happen.”

  “Yes. Yes, they do. They know who did it?”

  “Uh-uh. Someone got in his cell during a free period. No video, either. The DVR was down.”

  Walsh kept the smile from her voice.