Revolution No.9

by Neil Mcmahon

  So far, all was peaceable. But several police cars had moved into the marina, inching their way through the crowd, which parted, grudgingly, to let them pass, then immediately closed to swallow them like a giant amoeba engulfing its prey. A white-and-red Coast Guard patrol boat was hovering just outside the mouth of the harbor’s channel, and Monks had seen three different helicopters-a Coast Guard Dolphin, a dark green Bell sheriffs’ search-and-rescue craft, and a small one he couldn’t identify that was probably the media. Not surprisingly, the local residents looked alarmed.

  The cricket-like chirp of Monks’s cell phone in his coat pocket startled him. He had brought it as a backup in case radio contact failed, but he hadn’t expected it to ring, and he didn’t want to be seen using it. He angled his steps away from the crowd with covert speed, shielding the phone with his hand to talk, as if he were coughing.

  “This is Monks,” he said.

  “Oh, God, you’ve got to help me.” The woman’s voice was shaking, the words spilling out in a fearful rush.

  But Monks recognized Marguerite. This was the first time anyone had heard from her since the night that she had slipped away from him on the beach.

  Startled, he said, “Yes, of course, honey. Tell me what you need.”

  “You were right, he killed Motherlode, and he wants to let Mandrake die. I know that now. What if my baby’s not perfect? He’ll do the same thing.”

  “Your baby?” Monks said, with swiftly deepening surprise.

  Then he understood.

  “Jesus, Marguerite, are you pregnant?” he said. “By Freeboot?”

  “He chose me to start his new dynasty,” she sobbed. “Then I found out the truth. Now he doesn’t trust me anymore. I’m just a, a thing, like a cow. Breeding stock. He’s keeping me here. Please, come get me and hide me.”

  Monks strode deeper into the scrubby headland vegetation and raised his voice, knowing that Pietowski would hear at least his end of the conversation.

  “Where are you?” he asked her.

  “He won’t tell me. Somewhere back in the woods, like always. He’s gone now, but there’s others around. I’m sneaking this call, I can’t let them see me.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “ Bodega Bay. Him and some others.”

  Monks’s scalp bristled. “What does Freeboot look like now?”

  “I don’t know. They’re all wearing disguises and I didn’t see them leave. Oh, God, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Come on, Marguerite, think. There has to be something that will help us find him. Then you’ll be safe.”

  There was a several-second pause. “Callus,” she said tremulously. “He’s the one you shot. He’ll be limping.”

  Monks had a grim flash of satisfaction. He hadn’t known until now that Callus, the maquis who had beaten his shins, was the man he had shot. But a glance at the teeming crowd mocked the hope of finding a single limping man among the thousands.

  “Keep talking,” he said. “Think out loud. What else?”

  “Someone’s coming.” Her voice sharpened with panic. “I have to go.”

  “Marguerite, call back and stay on the line,” Monks said urgently.

  But a man’s voice cut harshly into the background on her end. “Hey, what the fuck you doing? Give me that.”

  “Chill out, man,” she said shrilly. Then she squealed in fear or pain.

  “Marguerite!” Monks yelled.

  There was a brief scuffling noise, a clonk as if the phone had hit the floor, more of her squealing and unintelligible words. Then the connection went dead.

  Monks clenched the phone in his fist, willing it to ring again, knowing that it would not.

  “Andrew, did you get that?” he said into the transmitter.

  “Some of it.” Pietowski’s voice was tinny in Monks’s ear, but his vexation came through. “We’re already looking for the limper. You got any more description on him?”

  Monks remembered Callus, all right-his ruthless face and brutal efficiency.

  “Five-ten to six feet, athletic, hard-looking. Very clean cut when I saw him, like the others. Nothing that stood out.”

  It wasn’t much help, but Pietowski said, “All right, now we know they’re here. Let’s go rip some new assholes.”

  Monks moved back toward the crowd, his rage at Freeboot and the maquis boiling up afresh. With it came a weight of worry for Marguerite. It seemed that she had finally come to her senses-but at what price?

  38

  Traffic moved at a crawl along Highway 1 through Bodega Bay, choked by the thousands of pedestrians and hundreds of cars parked illegally along the roadside. A forty-foot Bounder RV edged along in the stream, another bewildered and frightened tourist trying to get through this wild mess. But then it pulled over into a space conveniently vacated by two cars, just as it arrived. The passing crowd swirled around the big rig like water around a stone, but not without offering up plenty of jeering, hostile glances, and occasional raised fingers to this symbol of leisure and wealth.

  Shielded behind the smoked windows, Freeboot watched them stonily, with the mixture of pity and contempt that rare men like him-men of great vision and ability-had always held for society’s losers, whose asses had first to be kicked into realizing the power they held, and then into using it. In fact, the RV was just the opposite of what it seemed-a command post for an army that didn’t yet know it existed. And the first battle in the war was coming together out there on the streets right now.

  The RV’s parking spot, secured early that morning by the maquis, was a vantage point on high ground, with a clear view of the marina below. Within a couple of minutes, Freeboot saw a California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop approaching, navigating slowly but steadily through the throng. Tension and disdain were obvious in the faces he passed, but no one was ready to take on The Man.

  Yet.

  Freeboot moved to the RV’s passenger door and opened it. Anyone who saw him would have taken him for a middle-aged tourist. He looked completely different than he had three months ago. He had spent a lot of that time in Panama. That was a great place-mescal, cocaine, pretty women, and plastic surgeons who didn’t ask questions. His cheeks and nose had been thickened, a chin implant added, and his ears angled forward to give him a bearlike look. His hair and beard were short, white, and well trimmed. He wore a padded shirt and a fanny pack across his belly to accentuate a paunch. But underneath it, his ferally strong body was the same.

  The cop pulled up to the door, straddling his big BMW motorcycle. His brawny forearms and biceps stretched the short sleeves of his tan shirt. A Smith & Wesson.40-caliber automatic rode high on his right hip. He wore knee-high black boots, tight black gloves, and aviator sunglasses.

  Behind the glasses, Freeboot knew, Hammerhead’s eyes were bloodshot and crazed with meth.

  The passing crowd drifted away from this exchange-a cop probably checking on the safety of the RV’s well-off passengers, maybe offering them an escort out of here.

  “It’s going to start real soon,” Freeboot said quietly. “Get it done, and ride out like a son of a bitch. You’ll be gone before they know what happened.”

  Hammerhead’s lips were set in a tight line-the tough look of a cop in a tense situation. But they moved in a sudden tremor, and a little froth of saliva spilled out of one corner of his mouth.

  “You talked to her again?” he said.

  Freeboot assented, a slow, assured raising of his head.

  “Just a little while ago,” he said. “Marguerite’s had some wrong ideas, but that’s all over. She’ll be waiting when you get back.”

  Hammerhead’s corded forearms flexed as he put the bike in gear and accelerated away.

  Taxman stepped from the RV’s rear section, carrying a long nylon duffel bag, the kind that athletes used for equipment. Inside it was a Remington model 700.308-caliber rifle with a Leupold scope. He lowered the passenger-side window a few inches and raised the gun to his shoulder,
keeping all of it but the scope inside the bag, slipping the tip of the muzzle out through a slit and bracing it in the window opening. The crosshairs found Hammerhead’s white helmet and followed it.

  “You going to be able to pick him out?” Freeboot said.

  “As long as everybody’s where they’re supposed to be.” Taxman stashed the bag in a cabinet.

  “If they’re not,” Freeboot said, “get creative.”

  He kicked off his shoes and stripped off the padded shirt, replacing it with a Kevlar vest.

  Inside the RV’s bathroom, Shrinkwrap was putting the finishing touches on her young lover’s disguise, kneeling before him and dabbing Mehron stage makeup on his face while he sat on the closed toilet lid.

  “Perfect,” she said, holding up a compact mirror in front of him.

  Glenn Monks stared into it, looking like he had stage fright. His lips parted, showing his blistered teeth and gums.

  “Don’t be scared, baby,” she said softly. “I’m very proud of you. I know how much it’s hurt you, everybody thinking you’re just a computer geek. Today, you make full maquis. Remember, as soon as it starts, clean up with these”-she tapped the packet of moist towelettes in his shirt pocket-“and get your ass back here.”

  He nodded, swallowing dryly.

  “What’s the first thing you’re going to say when you get up there?” she asked in a teasing voice.

  “People, y’all listen to me.” His voice was shaky, and it cracked.

  “Don’t panic, try it again,” she coaxed. “You’re cool, baby, you’re the coolest rapper I’ve ever heard. Just be you.”

  “People, y’all listen to me,” he cried out, with strained force. “We here today to talk about gettin’ back what The Man been takin’ away from us.”

  “Perfect,” she said again, rubbing his thighs through his pants, comically baggy jeans worn with the waistband just above his pubis and the cuffs dragging on the ground.

  Her hands moved to the zipper. “Now lean back and close your eyes,” she whispered. “I’m going to give my brave soldier a good-luck present.”

  A few minutes later, she walked with him to the RV’s cab and watched him slip out into the crowd. It hurt. He had touched that deep, sweet spot in her. But Freeboot was right-the meth had been getting to him, making him petulant, unreliable, tiresome to be around, and a risk if he got caught. It was a hard truth of all successful politics that sometimes, individuals had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

  There were plenty of other lovely boys out there, younger ones, with bright white smiles.

  39

  Striding back to the marina, Monks was jolted by the fear that it had caught on fire. What looked like a wave of flame was sweeping through the crowd.

  Then he realized that he was seeing several hundred garish T-shirts, colored nuclear sunset orange, worn by the oncoming partyers.

  A closer look stunned him even more. The T-shirts’ central logo was a cartoonishly ugly vulture with an evil grin, pinning the neck of a squealing lamb with one taloned foot, while ripping out its guts with the other. Above that, in large bold letters, was printed: THE BIRDS IS BACK, BABY!

  And below it, bloodred and shaped like jagged lightning flashes driving into the scorched earth, were the characters REV # 9.

  “Are you seeing these T-shirts?” he said into his hidden microphone.

  “There’s cars with trunkfuls of them-they’re handing them out free,” Pietowski growled. “The caps, too.”

  Monks hadn’t yet noticed those, but now he saw that most of the T-shirt wearers were also sporting dark blue or black stocking caps, pulled down low over foreheads and ears, hiphop style.

  “Now they all fucking look alike,” Pietowski said. “We’re going to disperse them. Watch yourself, this could get rough.”

  Monks was starting to hear the faint, faraway sound of sirens over the clamor of the many-thousand-limbed beast that prowled around him. The crowd heard it, too, and the noise level dropped as people turned to look toward Highway 1. Seaward, the throbbing pulse of helicopters thickened as they moved closer. Another swift, purposeful Coast Guard cutter was approaching from the direction of San Francisco. The local police and sheriffs, helmeted and wearing riot gear, were getting out of their cars, trying to start moving the crowd off the marina and back toward the highway. Knots of confrontation were forming, the partyers reacting with anger and taunts.

  “People!”

  Monks swung toward the sound, shouted over a megaphone. It came from a young black man wearing a stocking cap and one of the garish orange T-shirts. He had climbed up on top of a fish-processing shed at Spud Point, where the crowd was thickest.

  Holding the megaphone to his lips, he yelled again.

  “People, y’all listen to me. We here today to talk about gettin’ back what The Man been takin’ away from us.”

  Monks absorbed instantaneous and disturbing impressions. The accent didn’t sound quite right-it had the ring of a white man trying to imitate black speech. The voice was high-pitched, strained-

  And yet, even over the megaphone, familiar.

  “Oh, Christ,” he breathed, and took a running step to throw his arms around his living son. Then he stopped just as fast and hovered, breathing hard, torn between the need to get to Glenn and the fear of what was going to happen to him when the police got him.

  “Now I want y’all to look around you,” Glenn called out. He pranced on his perch, starting to gain confidence. “There is strength in numbers. Yeah! Look how many of us there are.”

  As more heads turned toward him and the crowd’s noise quieted further, the sirens and thunder of the chopper rotors rose, as if a giant volume knob was being turned up. The Coast Guard patrol boat was discharging armed men at the harbor’s mouth, and the sheriffs’ helicopter was landing on the headlands to the west, dropping what looked like a SWAT team. Red and blue lights were lining Highway 1, popping like flashbulbs at a celebrity wedding.

  “Now, when The Man put on his uniform, he think it give him the right to walk all over us. But when we put on our uniform-” Glenn pulled the T-shirt away from his skinny chest and patted himself on the head in demonstration-“well, he don’t know who we be. So that give us some rights, too. Y’all see where I’m coming from?”

  “Cease and desist!” a much louder voice interrupted. This one was coming through an amplified microphone mounted on a Sonoma County sheriff’s truck, not just a handheld bullhorn. “This is a police order. You with the megaphone-come down and walk forward with your hands up. People in the crowd, start dispersing peacefully.”

  “You think they gonna arrest us all?” Glenn shouted scornfully. “Where they gonna put us? The jails are already full, baby! Full of people who smoked a joint, or stole some food ’cause they was starving! While the motherfuckers who stole your jobs and your homes and your dignity, they flying around in private jets! Yeah!”

  A different kind of murmur was starting to rise from the crowd, with a tone of angry assent. Monks saw several clenched fists raised into the air.

  “This is an unlawful assembly,” the police microphone bellowed. “I repeat, disperse yourselves peacefully.”

  The cops on foot were shoving their way toward Glenn now, but the crowd was shoving back. Nightsticks started to flail. Monks fought his way along, his hesitation gone-in a panic to get to Glenn and drag him out of this insanity.

  “Andrew, that’s my son up there. That’s Glenn!” Monks yelled into his microphone. “I need help getting him safe!”

  “Ten-four that,” Pietowski said. “We’re coming.”

  Monks was twenty yards away from the shed when a California Highway Patrolman on a motorcycle came charging through the tangled mass of people, running straight into whoever got in his way and kicking them aside. Monks got a glimpse of his bull neck and broad back.

  As the cop passed in front of the shed, he slowed and unholstered his pistol, raising it to aim at Glenn.

  Monks stared, ri
gid with disbelief.

  Then he yelled, “No,” and threw himself forward, grabbing shoulders and handfuls of clothing to claw his way through the crowd.

  A man with the look of a biker snarled, “Watch it, fucker,” and punched him hard in the side of the head, knocking his sunglasses flying. Monks reeled, tripping over legs-

  Hearing the terrible thumps of high-powered gunshots.

  When he fought his way to his feet again, Glenn was gone from sight. The motorcycle cop was riding on, waving his pistol. Now people screamed and trampled each other to get out of his path.

  And then, a black spiderweb the size of a half-dollar appeared on the back of the cop’s white helmet, like an eggshell shattering. It slammed him forward over the careening bike’s handlebars.

  “Eleven ninety-nine, officer down!” the police microphone roared. “Code Three for all law-enforcement personnel!”

  Monks struggled on toward where Glenn had been, now trying to keep from getting knocked down and stomped to raw meat by the fleeing human torrent. People were surging in all directions, even swarming over the marina’s moored boats and leaping into the channel. Through the yells and screams around him and the pounding in his own ears, he was aware of more gunfire, and he caught glimpses of shouting cops with raised weapons. A cordon of police had formed around the fallen Highway Patrolman, shielding him from the stampede.

  “…return fire!” he heard the microphone boom. “There are snipers in the crowd! Repeat, officers are authorized to return fire!”

  Monks made it to the shed where Glenn had been perched and clambered up the webbed iron frame of a derrick to the roof. Two cops were already up there, crouched, swiveling tensely with pistols ready, watching the chaos below.

  Glenn lay off to one side, prone and still.

  Monks jumped from the derrick onto the roof. Both cops swung to face him, aiming at him with two-handed combat grips.