“Should’ve heard ’em screech,” he’d said with a reminiscent chuckle.
Kelly’d wagged a finger at him. “You’re wicked!”
“Yeah, but I have fun,” he’d answered. “What I don’t have right this minute is a spider. Don’t know where that other one got to between then and now. Well, I expect I can come up with another one.” Kelly expected he could, too. And she expected he would.
Playboy ambled into the front room. He hopped up onto the couch and meowed for kitty treats. He did everything but put on sunglasses and wave a tin cup in Kelly’s and Deborah’s faces. Kelly finally fed him something to get rid of him.
“He’s our Hungry Tiger,” Deborah said.
“If he were a hungry tiger, he’d have us for lunch, not his crunchies,” Kelly said. Deborah thought that was funny. Well, Kelly did, too . . . up to a point. Every once in a while, when Playboy got annoyed, she’d see that I’d-eat-you-if-I-were-big-enough gleam in his eye. Since he wasn’t, he had to put up with being adored. Cats had a rugged life, all right.
He was an indoor kitty. Kelly didn’t want him going out and meeting dogs and raccoons and other cats with balls. So he saw birds and squirrels and such delicacies through the windows. Deborah called them his TV channels, which wasn’t a bad way to look at it.
He hunted, killed, and devoured crickets that got into the house. He hunted flies that got in, too. He also hunted the occasional buzzing bee or wasp. So far, he’d been lucky—he’d never caught one of those. He had proudly presented Kelly with the corpse of a small lizard he’d assassinated in the laundry room. She’d praised him and petted him and fed him kitty treats to distract him while she flushed the poor thing down the toilet. She didn’t think she’d distracted him well enough. He spent the next hour giving her reproachful looks, as if to ask Why didn’t you eat the tasty goody I brought you?
Deborah thought Playboy was the best kitty in the world. Every once in a while, he’d scratch her—or Kelly, or Colin—while he was pouncing on a piece of string or playing with a cat toy. He didn’t mean those; they were accidents that came from living with an animal that had claws.
Because she was still little, sometimes Deborah would literally rub him the wrong way or treat him too much like a squeeze toy. Then he’d swing with intent to hit. Where he was acting in plain self-defense, Kelly would spray Bactine on the scratches and remind Deborah she had to play nice with the cat.
Playboy was a good-natured beast. He had the manners of a gentleman—of a gentleman cat, anyway. But even a gentleman could lose his cool. When Playboy scratched or nipped without a good excuse, he got exiled to the laundry room till he yowled pitifully for release.
Gentleman or not, he definitely wasn’t the brightest cat that ever came down the pike. He knew—he knew—string and ribbon were a basic feline food group. He would swallow them whenever he got the chance. And, of course, then he would york them up again in short order, usually on the rug. Or sometimes he wouldn’t. Cat poop decorated with ribbon showed up in his box every now and then.
Colin had brought home a helium balloon with a ribbon to hold on to for Deborah’s third birthday. She’d liked it. Playboy thought it was the greatest cat toy in the history of cat toys. He launched himself through the air time after time at the ribbon while the balloon bounced against the ceiling. He sprang up onto the backs of chairs and the couch so he could bat at the ribbon and try to get it into his mouth. He even jumped onto the dining-room table, where he was totally not allowed. He knew going up there was a laundry-room offense. He knew, but he didn’t care. In his small, fuzzy brain, the quarry was worth the punishment.
“You’ve turned our cat into a criminal,” Kelly told Colin. She was only half kidding.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” Colin had sounded bemused.
Two or three times since then, though, he’d come home with more helium balloons to give Playboy something to do. Kelly’d bought him one or two herself. Playboy never got bored with them. And sometimes the great hunting beast would triumph. He’d snag the ribbon and scarf down a few inches before his people could take it away from him. Then it would reappear in one less attractive setting or another.
“Hey, when you’ve had your balls chopped off, you’ve got to make your own fun however you can,” Colin said.
“I guess,” Kelly said. “I just don’t see why he thinks it is so much fun.”
“Maybe he thinks they look like mouse tails or something,” Colin said, which seemed sensible even if Kelly didn’t know whether it was true. Most of the things Colin said seemed sensible. That made his deadpan jabs at the way things were all the more dangerous.
Which was what Kelly was thinking this morning when she heard a car out in the street. That didn’t happen every day any more. She looked up in surprise. It stopped somewhere close by. Two doors slammed. Footsteps came up the walk.
She went to the door. Looking out through the little panes of glass set into the wood, she saw two uniformed cops approaching and a San Atanasio PD black-and-white at the curb. “What’s up?” she asked as she opened the door.
“Mrs. Ferguson?” one of them said somberly.
Her world swayed. “Colin,” she got out. “Is he all right?”
“No, ma’am. I’m afraid not. I’m sorry, but you better come with us.”
XVIII
W
illie Sutton used to say he robbed banks because banks were where the money was. Colin doubted one modern robber in a thousand had heard of Willie Sutton. Whether the crooks had heard of him or not, the principle remained the same. This was the first time the check-cashing place on Sword Beach had been knocked over . . . this month. It was a nice day for riding a bike, anyhow. It was in the mid-fifties, with a few clouds but nothing that looked like rain. When not behind one of the clouds, the sun shone as bright as it ever did since the eruption.
Gabe Sanchez used the trip over as a chance to get his nicotine fix. As he and Colin turned right from Hesperus onto Oceanic, he lit a fresh cigarette and said, “I met a gal.”
“Cool,” Colin said. Gabe had met a fair number of gals since his marriage exploded. He hadn’t stayed with any of them long. He sounded a little different this time, though, so Colin asked, “Who is she? What’s she like? What’s she do?”
“Her name’s Ruby, Ruby Crawford. She’s black, but maybe half a shade darker’n I am. She’s, like, I dunno, somewhere between forty and forty-five—got a teenage daughter. Sergeant in the Hawthorne PD. I like her, y’know? Haven’t said that about a woman in I don’t know how long.”
“Cool,” Colin said again, this time in a different tone of voice. Cops often hung out with other cops. Who else was likelier to understand the crap they went through? Another thought crossed his mind: “Does she smoke, too?”
Gabe laughed. “Bet your sweet ass, Charlie. Yeah, we’re both junkies, all right. Her kid thinks it’s gross—can’t wait to go off to college and stay in a smoke-free dorm. Then she’ll light up the other shit instead. You wait and see.”
“Ha! Mine sure did.” Colin mimed toking. A little old Asian man in a floppy hat was trimming roses in his front-yard flowerbed. He waved to the cops as they went by. Colin waved back. He came this way fairly often. The old man probably knew he and Gabe belonged to the police.
They swung left from Oceanic onto Sword Beach. Colin pedaled harder. Smoker or not, Gabe stayed with him. The check-cashing place was about halfway from Oceanic to Braxton Bragg Boulevard. A black-and-white motorcycle and a bicycle with police lights were out in front of it.
A swarthy man had come out from behind his fortifications to talk with the uniformed cops. He gave his name as Farid Hariri. When Colin asked him why he hadn’t trusted to the metal and bulletproof glass, he answered, “Because the asshole had an AK-47. This stuff is supposed to be okay against pistol rounds, but not against military ammo.”
“You recognize an AK, do you?” Gabe asked.
“I used to carry one in Lebanon,” Hariri s
aid. “I haven’t touched one for twenty-five years, but I could field-strip it in my sleep.”
“Okay. You know one when you see one,” Colin said. He thought of Bronislav Nedic. How many men who’d fought in far-off wars were making honest or even not-too-honest livings in America these days? He’d have to wonder about that some other time. For now, he asked, “How about describing the crook?”
“Mexican. Maybe twenty or twenty-five. Medium size, medium build. Shaved head. Hoodie. Jeans. Nikes. I didn’t see no tats.”
“Doesn’t narrow it down a whole lot,” Colin said, suppressing a sigh. There were a hell of a lot of tough Hispanic kids in and around San Atanasio. “What did he get away on?”
“He ran,” Farid Hariri said.
That was, or could be, a break. A guy running with an assault rifle and a sack of cash wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. But, with the power down, even somebody who wanted to call the police might not be able to. How had cops nabbed perps back in the days before telephones?
Colin and Gabe had their two-way radios to cope with times like this. So did the uniformed officers. One of theirs squeaked for attention. “Markowitz,” he said into it, then held it to his ear to listen. A moment later, he went, “Roger. Out,” and turned to his superiors. “Maybe we got lucky. A citizen flagged down one of our guys on bike patrol. Sounds like the perp’s holed up in a house on 146th, maybe a block east of Sword Beach.”
That wasn’t far away at all. Well, it wouldn’t be, not if the robber was on foot. “Let’s go get him,” Colin said. Out the door they went. Markowitz jumped on the motorcycle and roared away. The other uniformed cop and Colin and Gabe followed more sedately on their bicycles.
Colin had time to remember that he wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest. Neither was Gabe. They hadn’t figured they’d need to worry about it. The .38 in his shoulder holster didn’t seem like much when set against one of Sergeant Kalashnikov’s finest, either. Well, if they could establish a perimeter and make sure the bastard didn’t get away, that would do till the SWAT team showed up.
Gabe was smoking like a furnace. Colin wouldn’t have minded something to ease his nerves just now. From what he’d heard in the Navy, there was nothing like combat for turning abstainers into two-pack-a-day guys. He hadn’t understood that back then. Right this second, he thought he did.
The houses on 146th were at least sixty years old. A lot of tracts in San Atanasio were of this vintage. They’d gone up after the Second World War to house the vets and their Baby Booming families. Jobs were easy to come by and paid good money, the houses were cheap, and San Atanasio boomed along with the babies.
Then the neighborhood changed. As blacks bought in—the houses were still pretty cheap—whites and Japanese-Americans moved to Torrance or the Valley. Some stayed, but they said the city wasn’t what it had been any more. There’d always been Hispanics in San Atanasio. Some of them had been there longer than anybody else. Now more came. A big chunk of police work started to involve riding herd on gangs.
As he and Gabe rode up, a uniformed cop pointed to a yellow stucco house. “He’s in there!” she called to them.
“He didn’t run out the back door and hop the fence or anything?” Colin asked.
“Don’t think so, Captain,” the uniformed woman answered. “We’ve got a guy in the house behind it, the one that faces on 145th. He’s probably in the back yard now, and he’ll be able to see if the perp tries to bail.”
“Sounds good.” Colin nodded. “Anybody else in the yellow house? Does the bad guy live there? Does he have friends? Or are there hostages?”
“I don’t know,” the uniformed officer said. “Nobody’s screaming or anything. No shots fired.”
“Okay.” Colin got off his bike and walked toward the house. He stopped across the street, behind a parked car whose tires had gone flat. Maybe this would be easy. Maybe the kid in there would realize he couldn’t get away and come out with his hands up.
To help him realize that, Colin yelled, “You can’t get away! Come out with your hands up!” Then he yelled it again, in his bad Spanish.
A yell came back from inside the house, out through a partly open window: “¡Chinga tu madre!” English followed a moment later: “Motherfucker!” Not quite an exact translation, but close enough. The robber went on, “Don’t fuck with me, assholes, or I’ll blast the shit out of all of you!”
“That won’t do you any good,” Colin said. He didn’t say the kid couldn’t do it. A guy with a pistol might well miss him from across the street. A guy with an AK might well hit him. The bullets could punch right on through the stupid car he was standing behind, too.
He’d carried a gun for the San Atanasio PD for more than twenty years. He’d drawn it a few times, but he’d never once pulled the trigger except on the practice range. He was proud of that; it was the kind of thing he wanted to keep intact till he retired. He especially didn’t want to try shooting it out against an AK-47. Not quite coming to a gunfight with a knife, but the next worst thing.
“You cocksuckers better clear outa here or you’re gonna be sorry!” the robber shouted. “I ain’t bullshitting, dude!”
To show he wasn’t bullshitting, he started shooting. Glass exploded out from behind that partly open window. Colin had thought the guy was there, but curtains had kept him from being sure. Well, he wasn’t in much doubt now.
A bullet cracked past his head, maliciously close. Next thing he knew, he was on his belly behind the car. His suit would never be the same. Better my suit than my carcass, he thought as he yanked out the .38.
Pop pop pop pop pop pop! Those were all the San Atanasio cops’ pistols going off at once. The bastard with the assault rifle was still banging away, too. The AK’s reports were louder than those from the pistols, and seemed to come about as fast as all the pistol shots put together. It wasn’t even full auto, either, or Colin didn’t think it was. Fully automatic assault weapons were illegal in the States, and hard to come by. Semiautomatic fire seemed quite horrible enough, thankyouverymuch.
“Holy fucking shit!” Gabe yelled from somewhere behind Colin. That summed things up as well as anything.
The cops’ fire began to stutter as they paused to reload. There was also a brief pause from inside the yellow house. As soon as the robber swapped out his empty thirty-round banana clip and slapped on a full one, though, he was back in business. The barrage from out here must have left the front of that house looking like a colander. Why the hell hadn’t it left the bad guy looking the same way?
A bullet blew out the windshield on the car. It was safety glass, but even so. . . . A sharp fragment bit Colin’s left hand. He swore and slithered toward the front bumper. He could pop up behind the engine block, and it would shield him some while he fired.
He popped up. He fired three times, as fast as he could. There went all those years of being a peaceable cop. And then he felt as if somebody’d slammed his left shoulder with a Louisville Slugger. Next thing he knew, he was lying on his back. A Louisville Slugger wouldn’t’ve hurt this bad. A Louisville Slugger wouldn’t’ve made him bleed like a stuck pig, either.
“Colin’s down!” somebody shouted. “We’ve got to take that fucker now!”
That sounded like a good idea. Colin groped for something he could stick in the wound to slow the bleeding. Soldiers carried first-aid kits. Mostly deskbound cops didn’t, dammit. I could use a morphine needle, too, he thought vaguely. He’d never hurt so much. The world grayed out. He’d just started to worry about it when he couldn’t any more.
• • •
Kelly’d last been at San Atanasio Memorial when she had Deborah. This time, she’d had to give Deborah to the neighbors across the street. She wanted to call Marshall and Vanessa. (No, she didn’t much want to call Vanessa, but she knew she should.) She couldn’t even do that, not with the power out. All she could do was ride in the cop car and numbly worry.
“He’s in surgery, ma’am,” one of the uniformed men said. “Amb
ulance took him. It got there as quick as it could, as soon as the bad guy couldn’t shoot it up any more.”
“Couldn’t shoot it up because he’s dead?” Kelly asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good!” Kelly said. The fury of her response amazed her. Any punk who shot her husband had no business staying alive afterwards.
“He tried to beat it out the back door,” the cop explained. “And our guy in the yard of the house behind the house where he was at, he stopped him.”
“Shot him, you mean.”
“That’s right.”
“Good,” Kelly repeated. Most ways and most of the time, she was a liberal. But no, she couldn’t find sympathy for someone who’d hurt her family. “Can you tell me more about how Colin is?”
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. All I know is, they took him into surgery. The doctors, they’ll be able to tell you what’s going on.”
Only they didn’t—they were too busy doing what they needed to do to patch Colin up and put him back together again. She sat in a waiting room whose couch and chairs wore the hide of a particularly hideous Nauga. Gabe Sanchez was already there. He gave her a hug and showed her about where Colin had been hit. “He’ll pull through,” he said. “He’s a tough son of a gun.”
“I know,” Kelly said, wishing Gabe didn’t sound so much like a man whistling in the dark.
After a bit, Gabe gave an apologetic bob of his head and ducked out of the waiting room. Cigarette break, Kelly realized. She glanced at the magazines on an end table. None of them went back to the days before the eruption, but a couple came close.
When Gabe walked in again, he had Malik Williams with him. The chief hugged Kelly, too. “They’ll fix him up good as new,” Williams said.
“Yeah.” Kelly made herself nod. The hospital had lights, computers, all the fancy gear that repaired people in the twenty-first century. Everything worked. Faintly, she could hear a generator chugging to make sure it all kept working. Most of the world could learn to live without electricity a lot of the time. It was a pain, but it could be done. Not in a place like this.
Things Fall Apart Page 30
