The Triggerman Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Into Holt's mind now flashed the image of his wife laboring four steps across the patio. He blinked slowly, leaving his eyes closed for just a moment so that he could see Carolyn without a red halo on her. And his memory took another leap back, but a much deeper one this time, and it landed Vann Holt in a darkened bedroom many years ago with his wife up close beside him and their mouths locked together. He could smell her breath.

  Then he opened his eyes and turned to John. "She was perfect for a while."

  Holt shook the vision from his head, then focused on the boys in the booth. There they were, little lapsed Catholics wearing red halos. Truculent bastards, he thought, what do they have, maybe twenty-five mustache hairs each? Boys.

  "Behold," he said. "Uneducated, barely literate. Lazy for the most part, due to the Indian blood. Given to binge drinking to replicate the old rites of peyote and mescaline. But a sixer of malt liquor doesn't give you interesting visions. Just gives you a bad mood. No future to speak of for these guys. They've never seen anybody from their streets really make it. What do they have to go on? Television? Isn't that right, boys?"

  "We make it out if we want, man," said the leader. "We got roots and we got family here. We take care of each other. We die for each other, if we have to. What're you anyway, whitebread gringo shitface, a fuckin' philosopher?"

  Holt looked at John. Still in a red halo. A little more red in it, maybe. But he was pleased to see the impassive expression on John's face, and the alertness of his eyes. He might be getting this, Holt thought: it actually might get through to him. He's capable of understanding.

  "And that right there, what he just said, is the shame of it all," continued Holt. "See, John, these guys have the warrior's spirit inside of them. Most boys do—twelve to twenty-five or so. They're full of testosterone, bravery, idealism and anger. Perfect warrior material. He's not kidding—they'll die for each other. Do it all the time. Parties. Weddings. Funerals. Any event you can drive past in a car and pop some rounds at. But there's the rub. Parties aren't wars and drive-bys are for cowards. No war, no warrior. What you've got is a mean little creep with a flannel shirt. A goddamned blue rag wrapped around his puny head. It's a waste. And it's a shame and it killed my boy and wrecked my wife."

  With this, Holt looked down at the boys again. "You remember shooting my wife and boy?"

  "We didn't shoot nobody, man. That was Ruiz and Ruiz disappear."

  "But there's some Ruiz in all of you. That's the part I'm talking to. I'm in your face right now because that kid was my son and that woman was my woman. Because I don't want you to forget what I look like. I want you to understand something, boys. I'm watching you. My men are watching you. We know you. We're here, even when you don't see us. We would have killed you all a long time ago if I thought it would do any good. But I haven't. It's not because I've forgiven you, or ever will. Not because you don't deserve to die. It's because there are too many of you and I'd have to kill you all. Don't have the time or the bullets for that. If I did, well, you'd be bleeding on that floor right now, like Patrick did after you shot him. Like my wife did. So don't ever think you got away with it. You didn't get away with anything. I've got your numbers. I'll call them in on the day I choose to. I'm all over you. Each and every one of you. I'm in the air, man. I'm the badass gringo ghost and you can't get rid of me. I'm everywhere. This is my turf. My blood is on it."

  Holt raised his right hand and aimed his forefinger into the face of one of the boys. The kid had paled.

  "Whose turf is this, son?"

  "It's yours."

  With Holt's finger-barrel aimed between their eyes, the next two agreed.

  Holt saved the leader until last. "Whose turf are you on, homie?"

  "This here is my fuckin' turf, pendejo."

  Holt hooked the leader in the nose with two fingers. The boy yelped, then struggled upward out of his seat, scrambled across the table through the junk food and the ketchup, spilling drinks with his heavy shoes, walking on air it seemed as Holt forked his head up high and started across the room. Holt looked like a ventriloquist with his dummy. The boy dangled after him, shoes just barely touching the ground. The kid's piece clattered to the floor as he clawed at Holt's upraised hand, to no effect whatsoever. The blood ran down Holt's arm and dripped off his elbow. At the door Holt let him down, blocked the kid's wild roundhouse with one hand, then snapped a kick to the chest that sent the leader reeling backwards faster than his heels could go, finally sprawling him over an unoccupied table. Holt kicked away the gun, walked over, yanked off the kid's bandana and wiped his bloody hand and forearm with it.

  "Whose turf are you on?" he asked.

  "Yours, man. Your fuckin' turf."

  "Remember that. The next time someone with blond hair and blue eyes wants to have lunch in here, you remember that."

  He looked around the restaurant one last time before turning to leave. An ocean of bright red seats and yellow tables, a few desultory faces staring back at him, the brightly clad employees behind the aluminum counter dully agog—and all of it outlined in pulsing red.

  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 30

  Holt guided the chopper across the dark blanket of the night, felt better now that he had seen the place where Pat had d because he had come through the Red Zone and found Clarity.

  It was like having an orgasm of fury instead of an orgasm pleasure.

  Now the control stick felt like an extension of his body 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 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, 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 sigh to what I need to do."

  John seemed to think about this. Holt watched him star 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 small
er 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. Ho dipped the chopper down low and hit a search light that threw 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?"

  "Goodness, 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 report 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 sensation 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 on 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. Untell 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 over 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 agg
ression. 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.