Total Immunity

by Robert Ward

  “Wait,” he intended to say. “Wait a minute. We’re friends, we’re on a quest or some shit like that . . . I mean it.”

  But it was too late. In a few seconds, both his money and Flyboy (and the other, bigger guy, if he even existed) were long gone. As he passed out Kevin heard the honking of the ducks.

  He awakened two hours later, a spotlight burning his eyes.

  “Hey. There you go, kiddo. You’re coming around.”

  He looked up at an LAPD officer, a huge man with a walrus mustache.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “Kevin Harper. Where am I?”

  “About two feet away from falling into the canal,” the officer said.

  Kevin looked over at the black water, smelled the stinking ducks again. His head throbbed, and it was all he could do not to burst into tears.

  “Well, your father will be mighty relieved to find you,” the cop said. “There’s been an all-points bulletin out on you. FBI agent’s son gone. People thought it was everything from child porno to terrorists.”

  Kevin shook his head, unable to speak.

  Now it came back to him. Flyboy, the great quest to score pot, the steel pole in his head.

  “You’re gonna need some stitches up there,” the officer said. Behind him a red light was blinking on and off , and a siren

  was screaming.

  “I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Kevin said. “Really.”

  “Oh, yeah, you do,” the kindly cop said. “You stay right there. You are gonna take a nice fun ride on a stretcher.”

  Kevin felt the tears rolling down his eyes now. Not from the pain, but from the shame of it all. He’d thought he could take care of himself, and that kid . . . Flyboy . . . had just suckered him right into it.

  What a joke.

  And his father . . . oh, man, Dad was going to kill him.

  That fucking kid . . . Kevin felt something coil inside of him. He’d come back here and he’d get that kid. He would. The bastard!

  The light was hideous in the emergency room of Santa Monica Hospital. Kevin lay there motionless as a Dr. Wahrabi sewed up his head.

  Jack and Julie stood above him, looking down at him. They looked harried, exhausted.

  “He’s going to be fine,” the doctor said. “Lucky boy. I don’t think you even have a concussion.”

  “Hard head,” Jack said. An attempt to make a small joke, but Kevin could tell there was not much humor behind it.

  The doctor gave him some prescriptions for pain medicine and said he wanted to see him again in four days.

  When he had gone, Jack sat down on the bed next to his son. “How did this happen?” Kevin looked down at his sheets. He could lie to his father, but not if he had to look him in the eye.

  “I don’t know. I was exploring around the canals. I’d always wanted to see them and somebody came up from behind me and hit me over the head. Stole my money.”

  “You didn’t see the guy who did this?”

  “No,” Kevin said. “How could I?”

  Jack looked down at him with such intensity that Kevin felt sick.

  “You were climbing around the canals all by yourself?”

  “Right.”

  “Kevin,” Julie said. “Do you have any idea how much you worried us? Walking away from school, disappearing, practically getting your brains knocked out of your skull?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kevin said.

  Julie shook her head and sighed deeply. It had obviously been rough on her.

  “We didn’t know where you were. What happened to you.”

  “C’mon, we’re going home,” Jack said. “We’ll deal with this tomorrow. Needless to say, you’re grounded for a month. No visits from friends, no trips to the mall, nothing. You come home, you study, and you go to bed.”

  Kevin didn’t say a word. It was not going to be fun. But it could have been worse. Much worse.

  His father looked down at him. Patted his cheek and then handed him a clean shirt he’d brought from the house.

  “Let’s get home, kiddo,” he said.

  Kevin felt Jack’s strong, firm hand, and suddenly wanted to cry again. But then he thought of Flyboy, and what he would do to him when he caught him.

  That son of a bitch was going to pay. He’d get all his money back and more. Just wait and see. Wait and see.

  8

  JACK’S MENTOR ZAC BLAKELY had served with the FBI for over thirty years, and was due for retirement in less than six months. He and his wife, sculptor Val Lewis, lived on Hollywood Hills Road in leafy Laurel Canyon, in a classic canyon glass-and-steel deckhouse, which was surrounded by a canopy of green and fragrant eucalyptus trees. On their back deck they had a hot tub, which Blakely liked to tell guests had “won the Academy Award.” When people looked surprised he laughed and told them that the ancient tub had first been a water tower in the great Billy Wilder movie Stalag 17. Near the movie’s end, when William Holden tries to sneak out of the camp, he hides in the old water tower and later manages to get away to neutral Switzerland. After the movie was shot, Zac Blakely’s uncle, Steve, who worked as a carpenter on the set, put the “tower” on the back of his truck, and drove it directly from the studio, up the steep and winding roads of the canyon, and attached it to his deck, where it had stayed ever since. Later, Zac bought his uncle’s house and so had his own little piece of Hollywood history: a hot tub that had won the Academy Award.

  Blakely and his younger wife Val had two grown kids now, and as he approached sixty, he spent more and more time relaxing in the tub. He looked forward to the day when he wouldn’t have to go in at all . . . the whole deal, going undercover, tracking down bad guys, had become too much for him. He was tired, and ready to hand over the rigors of being an agent to a younger man . . . a man like Jack Harper.

  During the past few years it had been especially tough being an agent. The scandals, the reorganization of the Bureau, and the rise of the Homeland Security Department, the endless war in Iraq, made Blakely’s job all the more difficult.

  He was glad he didn’t have to learn Arabic, and he knew damned well that it would be near impossible for a white, older agent like himself to go undercover in the Muslim world.

  The glory days of WASP agents were now just about as outdated as Hoover’s evening gowns.

  Lon was glad to retire and, unlike a lot of guys, he didn’t think he was going to have much trouble finding things to keep him occupied in retirement. Between working on his deck, fixing up the house, fishing, and deep-sea diving, he was pretty sure he was going to like having his days to himself. He didn’t have any great desire to top off his life with expensive trips, boats, or cars. He was a relaxed kind of guy most of the time, happy doing things around the house, or watching a movie.

  Unfortunately, his wife Val, twenty years his junior, didn’t really feel that way. She had given up her free Venice beat kind of life when she married Zac, and though she loved him fiercely, she didn’t really want to spend the rest of her life playing tennis and going to Costco.

  She dreamed of traveling to Rome, going on safari in Africa, maybe even climbing mountains like some of her Mulholland Tennis Club friends had. Unfortunately, all that cost money. Money they wouldn’t get on Zac’s modest pension.

  The thought of spending her waning years just lazing around the house worried her, made her bitter. She was already lonely enough . . . hanging out at the nearby tennis club was fun for a while, but the people were mostly bores, Republicans whose idea of an exciting night out was going to the Hollywood Bowl and seeing Barbra Streisand. She was sick of the club. The only thing she did there was play tennis twice a week and drink the rest of the time.

  She had denied her drinking to Zac, but he knew it anyway. The way she slurred her words, the way she’d let her appearance go to hell.

  He knew she was beginning to fall apart.

  He worried that if he didn’t supply her with the things she wanted in retirement, if he didn’t make up to h
er all the lonely nights she’d spent while he was away on endless cases . . . that she might even leave him.

  Blakely was famous for his bravery in action. He’d survived street gun battles in São Paulo, and a jungle shoot-out with AK- 47s blasting at close range in Brazil.

  But when he thought of losing Val, the most interesting and glamorous person he’d ever known . . . he actually got scared. He could see her walking out, still attractive enough to snare a show-business exec . . . some older guy who wanted a woman like her around as a trophy. The thought of losing her made him ill.

  Without Val, his retirement would mean nothing.

  Money . . . money was always at the root of everything. You could say you’d done your duty, you’d lived an exemplary life, but if you didn’t have the money you were finished. People like Val had expectations, and they could put them on hold for only so long.

  That was what Zac Blakely was thinking about as he got into his old BMW (a car he’d bought secondhand and which, in truth, didn’t run that well, but gave the appearance that he and Val were wealthier than they were) and headed down the hill to work.

  He took the first curve easily, and thought about the work he had to do today. There was a bank robber loose down in Orange County; maybe it was the same guy who had knocked over three Wells Fargo branches in Studio City six months ago. He had to drive down to Newport to talk to Agent in Charge Cabot Newsome.

  But first, of course, he reminded himself he had to drop off the laundry at the Laurel Canyon Country Store.

  Blakely saw the steep left-hand turn at Wonderland Avenue coming up and eased his right foot down on the brakes.

  But there was a problem, a rather serious one.

  When he applied the brake pedal, it went all the way to the floor.

  Blakely didn’t panic. Could have just been a fluke. Slowly, he hit them again, trying to pump them, so that the hydraulic would kick in.

  But it didn’t matter how he did it, hard or soft, the results were the same. There were no brakes. Nothing.

  Wonderland Avenue is a steep hill, and usually there is a long slick patch of water, which runs off from a stream, which is situated at the very top of Lookout Mountain. When you hit the water, your tires sometimes skid right and left, and you have to gently pump the brakes again to keep from skidding. Since Blakely didn’t have any brakes, he tried steering his way through the little flood, but his effort was useless.

  He was already going too fast to keep control of the car.

  Now he found himself headed down the street sideways. He swung the steering wheel into the turn, a hard left, so that he could compensate for his right drift.

  The effort seemed to help a little. He managed to straighten out the tires as he headed down the hill. But once the car straightened out, he had another problem. He quickly began to pick up speed.

  Time for the emergency brake. He tried pulling it, but it, too, was detached. Then he knew for sure: This was no accident. Both his brakes were cut.

  He was screaming downhill faster now, and sixty feet in front of him was the stop sign at Laurel Pass. Sitting at the stop sign was a yellow school bus headed for the Wonderland Elementary School. Blakely could see the kids in the school looking out the window, laughing, and daydreaming their kids’ dreams. They had no idea that a ton and a half of metal death was hurtling toward them at 80 miles per hour.

  Frantically, Blakely thought about going through the stop sign straight ahead, but that wasn’t an option, either. For in front of him, walking across the street, was a whole group of kids with their mothers, walking, chatting with the chubby crossing guard dressed in her yellow vest.

  He couldn’t turn left and he couldn’t go forward without hitting the kids. There was only one other option.

  To the right was a parking lot . . . a small one in which the Los Angeles public-school buses parked for a few minutes, so they could let the kids out.

  If he could make a hard right, maybe he could find a parking space available, and just possibly he could slide into it, and if maybe he’d hit the wire mesh fence which surrounded the lot maybe — just maybe — the fence would help break his speed before he crashed into the school’s cafeteria wall.

  That he was going to hit the wall there was no doubt. But maybe, with the mesh fence and his air bag, he’d somehow survive . . .

  Then he thought of something else . . . If this had been Stein- bach’s work . . . well, they wouldn’t miss the air bag, either. No, they’d make certain that it couldn’t be deployed.

  Up until he had that last thought, Zac Blakely hadn’t started to panic. But now he knew . . . knew for certain that he was going to die. Steinbach must have carried out his threat. Even as his car screamed down the hill, Zac Blakely thought of his fellow agents. Hughes and Jack Harper. If only he could warn them somehow . . .

  He saw the bus getting close, closer. He saw the kids and their moms walking across the street. He heard a scream and he saw a mother throw herself over her child, and he turned the wheel hard right.

  The BMW screeched into a right turn, went up on two wheels, and somehow slid right by a parked yellow school bus before it hit the wire fence . . . but by now it was going nearly 90 miles an hour, too fast for the fence to make much of a difference. The fence snapped open, and Zac Blakely’s BMW smashed into the north wall of the Wonderland Elementary School cafeteria at slightly over 98 miles per hour.

  The car engine exploded on impact, and the cafeteria walls exploded with it, sending a shower of bricks and stucco and steel girders showering out into the parking lot. They rained down on the school bus, barely missing the driver, who had thrown himself on the floor.

  Blakely was right about the air bag. Whoever had worked on his car had gotten rid of the bag, too, and so seconds before the car exploded, he was sent sailing through the windshield, his throat cut by jagged shards of glass, his body broken in twelve places by the impact with the steel-reinforced school walls.

  In the end, Agent Zac Blakely lay on the hood of his BMW, like a broken doll.

  The mothers and teachers and children panicked, thinking that this surely must be a terrorist attack. They screamed and ran around looking furtively for the next wave of al-Qaeda terrorists.

  But nothing else happened. No one else came.

  Except one person. One person, whom no one else saw, because he was perched high up in the thick branches of a fi - cus tree. In his hand was a Panasonic DVX 100 digital video recorder. It was mounted neatly on his left shoulder, and he carefully recorded the entire crash. Now, with his powerful new lens, he zoomed in on the broken body of Zac Blakely, and then jumped over to the screaming, terrified children and their mothers and fathers.

  Staring at the havoc below, he felt a complex mélange of terror, horror, and an obscene ecstasy. The feelings were so strong that he nearly lost his balance and fell out of the tree.

  Which wouldn’t have done at all.

  Now he heard the police sirens coming. This presented the filmmaker with a problem. He would have loved to get the cops on film, too . . . the screeching of brakes, the LAPD leaping out, seeing the chaos and ruin for the first time . . . but what if, by happenstance, one of them looked across the playground, and saw him up there filming. That would be the end of everything, of all they were trying to accomplish.

  He knew he ought to run for it now, while there was almost no chance anyone would see him come down, walk up the hill to his car.

  But still . . . what good was the scene without the cops and then the Agency’s appearance? No good at all . . .

  Nah, he had to stay for a little of it.

  Besides, when he showed it to Jimmy tonight . . . Oh, man, now that was going to be worth any risk he had to take.

  So he stayed, waited, got the shots when the LAPD arrived. Saw the horror on their faces and got it all . . .

  And got Harper and Hidalgo, too, when they arrived. Got the look of total disbelief and shock on Harper’s face as he looked down at Zac Blakely�
�s broken body.

  Oh, yeah, hanging out was a risk, but in the end, it was more than worth it.

  He had it all, and he couldn’t wait for Jimmy to see it.

  And after he had all he needed, he climbed down the tree, walked up to his car, and shot out of the canyon, the back way.

  No one had even a glimpse of him.

  Jack watched as the ME took away the broken body of his oldest friend. He talked to Ed Charles, the medic at the scene, and learned that Zac Blakely had been killed on impact. He felt a rage so deep inside of him that he had to turn away from the scene for a minute before he could do his job.

  Jack walked over to a uniformed officer who was talking with one of the women who was walking across the street when Blakely had come roaring down the hill.

  “He couldn’t stop. I saw his face. He was straining to turn the wheel. If he hadn’t . . . we would have all been dead for sure.”

  The woman began to break down, and the officer put his arm around her.

  Oscar tapped Jack gently on the back.

  “They got a tow truck here. You want to go over the car first?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said.

  They walked across the parking lot, which was strewn with chunks of concrete from the cafeteria wall, and scraps of the burned vehicle. Jack looked down at a red mass, thinking for a second that it was his old boss’s intestines. But when he knelt down to take a closer look, he realized that it was stewed tomatoes, one of the items on the lunch menu for the day.

  He started to walk away when he noticed something else lying there, just a few feet from the mangled car.

  He reached down and picked it up.

  It was a torn piece of a photograph, looked to be the bottom corner of an old Polaroid. It looked as if it had been taken long ago, but the image on it couldn’t have been old at all.

  He was staring at a picture of a gravestone with the name Zac Blakely on it. The birth date was October 5, 1946, which, Jack was pretty sure, was his old friend’s real birth date. The date of death was today.

  “What the fuck is this?” Jack muttered to himself.