The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  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

  THIRTY

  Holt guided the chopper across the dark blanket of the night. He felt better now that he had seen the place where Pat had died, because he had come through the Red Zone and found Clarity. It was like having an orgasm of fury instead of an orgasm of pleasure.

  Now the control stick felt like an extension of his body and 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 he 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. Like 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 sightline to what I need to do.”

  John seemed to think about this. Holt watched him stare out 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. Holt dipped the chopper down low and hit a search light that threw a 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?”

  “God, 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 reports 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 sensational 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 one, 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. Unteli 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 ove
r 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.”

  He sped south again, staying low into Mission Viejo. “Down on one of those little streets—they all look the same to me—was where the Nightstalker took two of his victims. Raped the woman, shot the man in the head. Ramirez—a Mexican.”

  Then south and west to San Clemente, hovering near the pier, spotlighting a narrow road leading down to a parking lot. “That’s where a tough Mex gang speared a seventeen-year old surfer in the head with a sharpened paint roller. He died in the hospital a little while later.”

  Holt ran the spotlight across the cars in the lot, looking down from the port window of the Hughes. “I find these places from newspaper articles. I come out to the ones I feel might have resonance for me. Because when you get right down to them, when you put your feet on the ground where these things happened, you understand how ordinary it is. They don’t happen in cursed places. They don’t happen in certain parts of the country where you expect it. When you stand down in that parking lot and look around you—like I have a half dozen times—you see that things like this can happen anywhere. It’s in the fabric now. As I told you before, these interlopers don’t understand the value of where they are. They should not be here. But this is our country, our world. My years at the Bureau did nothing to change it—in fact, it got worse. But I refuse to go through my life up on Liberty Ridge and ignore it. I’m not immune. Patrick and Carolyn proved that to me. They’re all around us now, John. The killers and the fools, the rapists and the morons, the vicious, the stupid, the ignorant and the murderous, the desperate and the furious. This is our context now. And that is why I started Liberty Operations. I’m trying to stanch the fear. Make people feel safe from each other. Give people the freedom of security. When a family buys protection from Liberty Operations, they get protection. They get consultation on home alarm systems, safes, firearms defense if they want it, tear gas certification, manual self-defense.

  They get threat assessment. They get mirrors to check their cars for bombs, scanners to check their mail. They can get training for their dogs. They can get scramblers and tape recorders for their phones. They can get training to use any self-defense gadget on earth, and the gadget, too. They get armed response from the Holt Men. They get follow-up investigations if the cops don’t make an arrest. They get preemptive action, preventive strikes, protective aggression. They can even get extra-legal satisfaction, once known as vengeance, John. Expensive, but I provide it. They get two-thousand strong, healthy, capable Holt Men on the streets twenty-four hours of every day. Men who observe. Men who protect. Men who are on their side. Holt Men. The new centurions. Guardians of freedom. Best men in the world.”

  Holt spun the chopper back around to the north and accelerated through the darkness. He was thankful again that the Hughes was strong as ever, because he was not. Fading, he thought, but not faded; going but not gone. The orange and black machine supplied the strength that was draining from his body every hour of every day.

  Rage on.

  “Reach behind you,” he said.

  John found the bundle and unwrapped it on his lap.

  “Put the vest on under your coat. Don’t fire that forty-five unless it’s to save your life.”

  Holt smiled at John’s puzzled look.

  “Let’s go to work,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  He set the Hughes down in a small vacant field on Bolsa, not far from Little Saigon. It was private property and he knew the owner, knew his chopper would be safe there behind the chain link fence with the concertina wire on top and the patrolling Dobermans the owner would release when they were off the lot.

  He saw the two command and control vans—orange and black, clean and waxed to a finish that reflected the streetlights along the avenue—waiting on the street at the far end of the lot. He jogged across the barren dirt, waving John toward the vans. The young man looked perplexed but game. Holt could feel his heart beating evenly in his chest, and a growing affection for his newest apostle, whose lanky body and long coat moved through the darkness behind him.

  He saw four of his lieutenants standing outside the vehicles, arms crossed, waiting for him. There stands justice, he thought: Kettering, Stanton, Summers and Alvis. The best of the best. Holt Men. The Men. They were in standard patrol uniform—black pants and boots, short-sleeved button-down black shirts over Kevlar vests, bold orange neckties knotted in half-windsors and tucked into the shirts just below the third button. Each wore the sidearm they were licensed to carry on the job, and the hip radio, ammunition belt, flashlight and handcuffs.

  Holt’s eyes were strong now and Clarity informed every movement of his body, every thought that issued from his mind. He slipped into the Kevlar vest offered by Summers. He cinched the shoulder holster over it, slid out the .45 Colt Gold Cup with which he was certifiably lethal, checked the clip, jacked a round into the chamber, safed it and set it back into the leather.

  “What’s the word from Terry?” he asked. Terry, the ersatz fence, Terry the mole, Terry the confidant of the Bolsa Cobra Boys who were the mark tonight.

  “Terry says we’re on,” said Alvis. “Sometime after midnight. Six of them.”

  “How’s the family doing?”

  “The girls are with friends. Mr. and Mrs. were having dinner when we left. They’re scared and they’re laughing a lot.”

  “Good,” said Holt. “This is John Menden. Friend of the family. Good guy. May be working with us in the future.”

  The Men shook hands with John.

  “Nice work, what you did out in Anza,” offered Stanton.

  John thanked him.

  Holt could sense that they were mildly surprised, certainly wondering about Fargo, but saw no need to explain. There’s plenty of room in the world for good Men, he thought. Someday there was bound to be a changing of the guard.

  He climbed into the first van, motioning John to follow. Summers drove and Alvis sat in the back with John. Holt watched the bright lights of Little Saigon pass by on either side, saw the noodle shops and cafes, the empty parking lots littered with flyers, the steel gratings behind the shop windows, the young people still out walking. He turned and spoke to John:

  “Our clients are the Vu-Minh family. He’s a dentist; she’s a lawyer. Been in the country since 1974. Two daughters. Bright and beautiful. The Bolsa Cobras picked them for obvious reasons—nice house, plenty of income. Upper middle class and unsuspecting. We’ve got a man close to them. Now, we’re going to let them move in, start their thing, then kick their fucking butts.”

  “How many men will you use?”

  “Six, including you, inside. Five pursuit vehicles with two men each, and the two vans, which are about to get fresh crews. One helicopter, in case things fall apart. Stay close to me and do what I say. Don’t do anything else. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They pulled along the curb ten minutes later. The house was in an older suburban neighborhood shaded by jacaranda trees that threw dark profiles against a darker sky. Holt looked up to the stars beaming in the cloudless night. He walked up the driveway toward the house. He saw two more of his Men co
ming from the front door, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Vu-Minh. New Men, he noted: Rodgers and Mason. He stopped as they approached, but said little more than a short hello to Allen and Joan Vu-Minh. Stanton had already told them what would happen, and this was no time for elaborate Asian pleasantries.

  He stood in the doorway of the home and watched the two command and control vans slide off toward the avenue. He closed the door and locked it. He watched Kettering place the long canvas bag on the carpet and distribute the four semi-automatic shotguns, keeping one for himself. He smelled the sweet aroma of mint and noted the plate of spring rolls left by Joan Vu-Minh on the living room coffee table. A pot of tea and six small cups sat beside them. He noted the lacquer paintings on the walls—romanticized treatments of pre-war Saigon, pastoral scenes from the Vietnamese countryside. The furniture was modest and tasteful, with Asian accents incorporated into Western design.

  The home brought contradictory feelings to Holt, a state of mind with which he was never comfortable. It was obvious that Vietnam needed people like Allen and Joan Vu-Minh more than the United States did. The land needed its people and the people their land. It was also possible that the Vu-Minhs would have been persecuted—perhaps executed—if they had stayed behind after the fall. More to the point, they were citizens of the republic now and they deserved justice.

  He dispatched Summers, Stanton, Alvis and Kettering to their positions: two in one of the girl’s bedrooms and two in the other.

  He took John into the living room, made sure the drapes on the windows were closed, then turned off all the lights except one in the kitchen. In the faint houselight he motioned John, then moved down a hallway and into the Vu-Minhs’ master bedroom. He turned on a lamp and moved two chairs against the far wall, beside the light switch, facing the door. He turned off the lamp and moved in darkness to the chairs. He sat and flipped the light switch on and off three times.

  “Sit next to me,” he ordered John. “Listen. The Bolsa Cobras have a little different routine from other Vietnamese home invaders. They don’t like daylight hours. The last three jobs they pulled were done around two a.m. They pick a doorlock—usually the front door—let themselves in and catch the victims sleeping. Tie them up at gunpoint. Take them into a bathroom, fill the tub and dunk the woman’s head until the man tells them where the cash and jewelry are. If the man won’t tell, they dunk him and work the wife. If she won’t tell, they ransack the place. They haven’t hit families with kids, yet. They like older people, people with savings. You know the Vietnamese don’t trust cash and don’t trust banks, so they keep lots of Krugerrands and jewelry. Keep it at home. They also don’t trust the law. Allen and Joan are known to have money. They do charity work. They drive expensive cars. They make the papers. So the Bolsa Cobras have decided to branch out and try a younger family with kids. They usually work in pairs. They’ve bulked up to six for this one. They’ll be full of adrenaline. Nervy. Quick.”