"But—"
"Believe it or not, your killer girlfriend has never fired one of these before. We need to practice."
"At night?"
"No, in the middle of the day when we can find hikers and children for targets."
This was going too far. "Why are you being so harsh?" Sheri demanded.
"Because I'm worried that you might only have one disaster in you. And with the men we've chosen, that might be one or two short of what you need."
At least that shut the girl up. A bag of bruised feelings, Sheri drove silently past Pasadena and up into the Angeles National Forest. Lydia still remembered a canyon up there where a plethora of signs prohibited target shooting and thereby designated the rocky terrain as the perfect target-shooting ground. Finally, on the long, peaceful night drive, she melted a degree or two.
"You know all about the Smullens," she told Sheri. "And you know Sam and Rudy well enough by now. Neither of them gives a damn what happens to them, as long as they get to go out playing hero and saving their ladies' lives."
Sheri actually nodded. "Rudy did that when he thought we were drowning."
"Exactly, but I'm not standing for it."
"But look at them! They're both too sick to do anything. How—"
"They've been sandbagging, if you ask me. I wasn't sure of it until tonight. They've been working this out for days, at least Sam has. I intend to be ready when it all falls apart around them."
At a bend in the forest highway, Lydia spotted the turn-off. And a dark, oversized, loud-mouthed SUV sitting across the rutted track. "Damn. Pull off ahead of them."
"Police?"
"Of course not. Probably drunks out carousing."
Sheri pulled off and nervously cut the engine. They sat there a silent moment, then climbed out into the utterly still night. Lydia edged around to the trunk and waited. A rustle in the bushes became two enormous shadows coming out toward them. And she was right about the drunk part.
"Whatsa matter, ladies? You lost?"
"No, thank you. We're just out for a little air," Lydia said, then quietly to Sheri, "Pop the trunk."
Sheri hit the button on the key. Lydia stopped the trunk lid from opening all of the way. She was trying to make a point for the weak-kneed young woman as much as anyone. One of the drunks stumbled as he approached Sheri. "Maybe we can help."
"I don't think so," Lydia answered. "Matter of fact, I think it's time you boys got on home."
"You do, do you?" the other drunk sneered. He was still fumbling at his zipper from lubricating the woods with his umpteenth beer of the night. "Maybe we were just waiting for the entertainment to show up."
In one fluid motion, Lydia let the trunk go, reached in to pull out a rifle, and racked the slide. She had omitted the clip, but didn't see that registering with this pair of amorous dopes. "See you later, boys," she said pleasantly enough.
"Jesus!"
"That's right, he'll protect you for another thirty seconds. Now get on out of here, before you land in serious trouble."
The two drunks grumbled off to their SUV, crawled in, and took off. The faintest of light reflected off the twin reclining silver bimbos glued to their back window.
"You aren't worried they'll report us?" Sheri asked.
Lydia laughed. She waited for the SUV's engine to echo away in the nighttime forest. "Hardly. And that was for your benefit, by the way, shooter girl."
Sheri snorted. "How's that?"
Lydia nodded at the faint stirring of balls in Sheri's tone. Still, the issue with Sam, Rudy, and the Smullens was serious grown-up stuff. Lydia decided to keep pushing the crude and callous buttons. "You don't always have to shoot every murdering bastard in the room to make your point."
"Who are you?" Sheri asked aghast. "I don't believe—"
"I'm just about the most lethal animal on the planet. I'm a good-looking, well-armed southern woman with an ax to grind and a man to defend. And the sooner you jump onboard, sister, the sooner we can get after it."
Sheri sighed, but Lydia wasn't budging. For the first time in weeks, she actually felt good about something. She had allowed her annoyance with her husband to propel her off her ass into her own semblance of action. She had no idea what Sam was up to, no clue if she was helping or hurting his plans, but it hardly mattered. At least she wasn't passively cowering on the crick and waiting for Sam to blow the Smullen hordes to smithereens. Still, she knew her own bluster well enough to recognize that it would evaporate, if this damn child didn't back her up.
Finally, Sheri reached into the trunk to grab the other rifle and two of the clips. She pointed up the trail into the box canyon. "So show me the way to hell."
"Now we're talking. But try pointing that thing at someone else."
Chapter 37
If Rudy had a deep and dark secret, it was that underneath the protective crust of his wisecracking, fuck-you shell, he still believed in heroes. He had known at least one authentic pair in his uncles Donny and Mischa. He wasn't sure about the gay thing—they pretty much kept that side of their lives under lock and key—but the part he had seen—all the tough, fearless violence, mixed in with compassion for Vera's son—had left him drooling for their approval. And they never once embarrassed him with it the way this old asshole did.
Still, Rudy couldn't deny how it had made him feel when the sonofabitch started throwing pillows at him—he couldn't deny it, but he couldn't bring himself to the humiliation of putting it into words. This old fart was one hard-ass loner of a human being, and it only took one look at the house he grew up in to understand why. At least Vera had decorated the hovels they lived in—until her habit took over and made her rip them apart again. But Sam's house was a soulless graveyard, and the seemingly empty ghost of a human being who had pulled Rudy out of there in the middle of the night kept nearly everything to himself. Like what they were doing now, aimlessly cruising some back street on the west side.
Rudy drove silently down the dark residential avenue, one hand on the wheel, the other cradling the camera in his lap. Sam sat uselessly in the passenger seat, so immobile Rudy had to check periodically to see if he was awake. Or alive. "I'm absorbing," Sam finally said, doing his new and inexplicable eye-of-the-camera guru thing. "With all that noise you throw out, it's a wonder you hear or see anything."
Rudy grunted unhappily. Apparently, this was all part of the little grasshopper drill. "What are we looking for?" he asked.
"Slow down along here. Look off to your left and start shooting."
"Shooting what? The houses?"
"You really don't know where you are?" Sam asked, aghast, but then Rudy glanced around and finally got it. Through the uniform bungalows and the trees and the carports and garages, he caught glimpses of the garish glass building with its colors muted in the distant street lighting. Fuck! He knew they were on the west side of town, but this had never occurred to him. This Sam was one ballsy motherfucker.
"I didn't run him over here. It was out on Western," Rudy said, and instantly regretted it.
"Jesus," Sam sighed. "Give me the damn camera. Drive all the way around the block and try not to gawk and stutter too badly. Then tell me what you saw."
Rudy did what Sam told him to do. The building faced Western and a side street on the northwest corner of the block, an island of glass surrounded on all sides by a large, abandoned parking lot. The other two side streets sported the ugly, soulless, post-war bungalows that plagued the Los Angeles photographer's landscape. The other half of the block on Western was a line of failing brick and stucco two-story businesses, shuttered for the night.
"So if you were going to attack, which direction would you come from?" Sam asked after they finished the circumnavigation.
Rudy hid his alarm at the implication. He thought and said, "I'd come straight at them off Western," satisfied with the cleverness of his answer.
"Why?"
"Because they'd expect me to hit them from the back through the houses."
&
nbsp; Sam nodded, then pointed beyond the building. "What about the businesses across Western?"
"What about them?"
"I'd be surprised if the Smullens don't keep shooters and lookouts up there in those windows. It's what I'd do. This whole thing looks like a killing ground. And the Smullens aren't in the building anyway. You'd have to get them here and then overwhelm them with firepower."
"We're going to kill them?" Rudy finally asked, figuring it was probably a stupid question.
"Sure, you and me," Sam snorted. "And if you're good, I'll even let you play with the big boom-boom."
"So what the fuck are we gonna do?"
"Right now you're going to put the top down and drive slowly around the block and photograph every house and building on either side. Anyone who comes out to look at us. Every car parked on the street, including number plates. You've got a hundred-fifty shots on the card, and we aren't leaving until you fill it."
"Aren't they gonna recognize us?"
"I damn well hope so."
So Rudy brought the convertible's top down and took off slowly in the chilly night air, swerving like a drunk all over the deserted avenue, snapping away with the camera. The pictures would all be shit, but he knew better than to bring that up. It took two times around to fill the card. The second time, a light appeared in the passageway between the two buildings.
"Right there," Sam woke up and pointed. "Get him."
"I don't see anyone."
"Don't worry. He'll show up on the computer. Just shoot him!" Rudy did so, repeatedly. "Let's go," Sam finally said. Rudy took a right north onto Western over the ground he had covered in reverse, slamming his car into Gus Smullen and starting this whole catastrophe. Funny how the old bastard had never mentioned that—he was so critical of everything else Rudy did.
"Where now, old wise man?"
"Henry's house," Sam answered, his eyes already closed again. "We've got to re-open an ancient connection."
Rudy drove off on surface streets back into town. In the chilly air, with the top down and the dark, vacant night sailing silently overhead, he emptied his mind of all the flotsam and clutter of the last few weeks. He absorbed, as photo guru Sam would have said—and to his surprise, heard his beautiful, addled mother whispering to him.
So much of what Rudy remembered of Vera was nonsense. As an addict, she had hopscotched and stumbled from one mindless revelation to another, without ever making a dime's sense out of any of it. As a small boy, Rudy had assumed that all those inarticulate ramblings meant something. Like his mother, he agreed that his lack of understanding implied some mental deficiency in him—until she let him try her stuff, that is, and he wound up in juvenile hall, tied to a bed in a pool of his own vomit. In draining the smack out of his veins, Rudy had drained every trace of his mother's voice, drained her right out of every pore and corpuscle of his heaving body. Until in the cold, unforgiving Pacific Ocean, with death only a gulp of salt water away, he inexplicably let her start up all over again.
But when Vera whispered to him now, it was in distinct syllables, words, even phrases. None of the slurred trash he remembered, but still random and truncated. Just now, as he drove through South Los Angeles into South Gate, she whispered about Henry, the ugly sonofabitch with the brother who thought too damn much. And less angry now, she talked about forgiveness, how fucking worthless and incomplete it was. And then she was spewing venom again for the self-righteous, camera-toting bastard who drove her with his purified intolerance into the arms of the ugly brown monster. She was a human being with weaknesses she couldn't do a thing about, not some fucking alien stone for sharpening his tongue on.
Coming into South Gate on Tweedy, Rudy glanced across at Sam and was surprised to find the old geezer staring at him. Or maybe staring through him at someone else. "What?"
"It wasn't all her fault," Sam said, then shut his eyes again before Rudy could make it a conversation.
Chills fluttered up Rudy's neck and across his shoulder blades in the cool night air. What? Was the old bastard even reading his mind now? He couldn't decide between thrilled and horrified at the possibility that they might be transmitting on the same wavelength. So instead, he settled for angry, and yeah, that felt about right. Rudy, who knew none of the history of his mother, who had entirely blotted her out, now found himself listening to her oblique warnings about this walking dead sonofabitch. And by the time they pulled into the driveway outside the graveyard of a house, Rudy would have quite happily picked up one of the guns in that underground bunker and sent Sam straight to the hell where Vera's voice swore he belonged.
Absorbing, Rudy snorted to himself instead. There wasn't a damn thing the old bastard could teach him about absorbing.
Chapter 38
It surprised Sam how long they took to come calling. He had expected the news of his re-occupying Henry's abandoned fortress to ricochet at light speed through the local underground, especially after he made a point of using Jorge's limousine service. Sam had always claimed civilian status, and he supposed they more or less believed him, but these were very careful people. A nun with the Spaulding name would have elicited a reaction by moving back here, much less a younger brother who had been known to trade on the Spaulding reputation when it suited him. Henry still cast a long, long shadow.
They showed up two days later, just before noon, and brought Carlo Becerra with them. Of course they did. It made sense to show Sam a familiar face, someone to stop the bullets from immediately flying. Sam remembered Carlo as a little squirt of a boy back in the day when you could still use words like nigger, chink, and spic and get away with it in a raunchy whites-only neighborhood. Carlo's family were the first Latinos to move in. They stoically endured every epithet in the book, until Henry, out of pure bloody-mindedness, took the little boy under his wing. Sam still remembered the day Henry brought Carlo home and sent their drunken father stumbling off to Mulligan's rather than sitting down to dinner with a ... whatever. Sam never gave a shit one way or the other. He and Carlo had always genuinely liked each other, and that came back now on Henry's front porch.
"I didn't know you were in the business," Sam said as he opened the door.
"Shut the fuck up and gimme some," Carlo laughed. He grabbed Sam, and the two of them hugged like only minutes had passed instead of a half-century. "Business, my ass," Carlo said. "I just heard you were back in this stink hole and had to see it for myself."
"No shit." Sam laughed. "I'm surprised no one's burned it down."
"Too dangerous, probably. No telling what you'd set off."
"This is true," Sam said and nodded. No harm in letting Carlo's bosses know. "The place is an arsenal."
"Always was," Carlo agreed without so much as a blink. He glanced behind him at the other two Latino dudes hanging onto the stair rails. They nodded respectfully and backed off to the car.
"Now that's a surprise," Sam said. So Carlo was the latest kingpin to rule the neighborhood?
Carlo laughed again. "You gonna invite me in, or you still don't let no fucking spics into your filthy gringos-only dining room?"
"I don't allow anyone in this pit. It's too embarrassing. Tell me where you're eating lunch, and I'll meet you there." So they made arrangements to meet at Alfie's on Atlantic in another hour. Henry's old watering hole, history repeating itself.
It took Sam most of the hour to extricate Rudy and himself from the clutches of their self-appointed nurses and minders. He never would have brought the young hoodlum, except that he still wasn't sure about driving, especially after eating José's food and matching wits with Carlo. But Sam threatened the boy with bloody murder, if he so much as opened his mouth without one of José's poisoned carnitas tacos to fill it.
The two Latino bodyguards were hanging out by the back doorway, when Sam and Rudy entered the restaurant and set off a commotion of Mexican Spanish. José rushed out of the kitchen for a hug, of course, but a half-dozen other workers and patrons woke up too and nodded to the Spaulding ap
parition in the polluted glow from the street outside.
"You can eat the food here now," Carlo laughed in the back room, when he saw Sam checking the chair for lice and spiders. "I'm not like Henry. It's okay with me if people don't throw up on the sidewalk after coming to see me."
Sam nodded at Rudy. "I'll still let him try it first." Carlo gazed quizzically at the boy until Sam introduced him as "Vera's kid Rudy."
"Holy shit! That's you?"
Rudy nodded politely, but kept his mouth shut as ordered, even through the obligatory memory Carlo dredged up of the baby on Vera's long lost hip. She had come here looking for Henry a gazillion years ago. She was some beauty, wasn't she? Or maybe not—Carlo glanced at Sam and toned down the polite gush Sam remembered as a weakness in his aging friend—the apparent weakness of a poker player who fumbled everything, except the last hand where he cleaned you out. Sam waited and watched Carlo's graying brain working overtime. Finally, he laid the pile of photo prints on the table and ordered lunch, while Carlo pawed through them.
"We took them on Western," Sam explained.
"I know where it is," Carlo snapped. "Now tell me the part again about you being a civilian?"
"No, no, this is personal." Sam nodded at Rudy. "Gus Smullen collided with my friend's back bumper."
Carlo repeated himself to Rudy, but with a new respect, "That was you?"
"The kid hates drug dealers," Sam explained.
"Don't we all? I heard something about kiddy porn—" Sam's laugh stopped him. "What?"
"I think I might have started that rumor."
That surprised Carlo. "You're talking to cops these days?"
"Hardly, but the cop you heard it from must have got it from a bug I planted in a loud-mouthed crime reporter's ear a few weeks ago."
Exposure Page 18
