California Fire and Life (45 page)

So tonight’s a big night.

She looks out the window at the beautiful stretch of beach and one of those incredible red California sunsets and all she wishes is that it would be morning.

Nicky’s gazing at the sunset, too.

Lev and Dani behind him on the lawn like lengthening shadows.

“It is as if we’re in the cell again,” Nicky says. “The three of us in a corner against the world. We are fighting for our lives. New lives. Years ago in that hell I promised you new lives. I promised you Paradise. Tomorrow—if we do what we have to do tonight—we will have those new lives.

“We are just a few steps from safety. Tonight will tell the story.”

Just a few steps from safety, but all the plans are made.

It will be a bloody night.

It already has been. Jimmy Dansky and Jack Wade dead in a fiery pas de deux.

And the sister.

There can be no mistakes this time, which is why he’s ordered Lev to do it. Lev will make no mistakes.

All other problems will disappear.

And I am a shifting cloud in a twilight sky.

Letty’s in no mood for sunsets. She feels like hammered shit.

Which is about right, she thinks, considering.

A deputy drives her home. Another drives her car for her.

“Want me to stay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.”

“The boss said—”

“I know what the boss said.” Letty laughs. “I’m fine.”

She has an ice pack and a bottle of Vicodin and some hopes that Jack will show up tonight to pamper her a little.

Fetch me a drink, fluff my pillow, make sure I get a good night’s sleep.

Because first thing in the morning, I’m taking my broken wing to Mother Russia’s house and questioning Nicky about what two missing kids were doing at his crib the night before they disappeared.

Boss told me to lay off Pam’s case and work the missing kids.

Follow it where it leads.

Well, guess what?

It leads to Nicky.

And where the hell is Jack?

You’d think he’d be falling all over himself to do the concerned male number.

She calls him at the office.

Gone.

Calls him at home, gets his tape, leaves a message.

She knows where he is.

He’s out working the arson case.

Lifer claims dog on the scent.

Job or no job, Jack will never give up.

It’s just one of the things she loves about him.

She loves him and she’s worried about him and she says a little prayer that he’s okay.

Then she takes two Vikes, gets into bed and turns out the light.

Natalie turns on the bedside lamp.

“Go to
sleep
,” she says to Michael.

“I can’t.”

He’s crying again.

“Why not?” Natalie asks.

“Ghosts.”

“They’re not ghosts, they’re shadows.”

But they are scary, Natalie admits. The branches of the big eucalyptus tree outside the window are blowing in the wind, making ghostlike arms and heads on the bedroom wall.

“I’m scared,” Michael says.

“Of what?”

“Fire,” Michael says. “Like burned up Mommy.”

“This house won’t catch on fire.”

“How do you know?”

I don’t know, Natalie thinks. She’s scared, too.

She has bad dreams.

Where there’s fire
everywhere
.

And Mommy’s asleep and won’t wake up.

“There won’t be a fire,” she says, “because I am the princess and that’s my command.”

“Who can I be?” Michael asks.

“The princess’s little brother.”

Michael whines, “Can’t I be something else, too?”

“Like a wizard?”

“What’s that?”

“Like a magician,” Natalie says. “Only better.”

“Can I make things disappear?”

“Yes.”

“Like ghosts?”

“Yes,” Natalie says. “Now go to
sleep
.”

“Leave the light on.”

She leaves the light on.

And lies awake and watches the shadows move.

Jack sits in the darkness.

All but invisible against the bluff, he’s waiting for there to be just enough light for him to see without being seen.

So he sits down and just watches the ocean.

Like he used to do as a kid.

Just sits at Dana Strand and does nothing.

The waves are silver under the full moon.

They fall on the beach with a sound like
shhhhhhhh
.

A Pacific lullaby.

Jack waits for the sun to come up.

Letty wakes up with a start.

A sound outside.

Footsteps on the deck.

She picks up her weapon from the side table by the bed and holds it in her good hand as she eases along the wall to the door.

Settle down, girl, she tells herself. Her heart’s racing and her hand’s trembling.

She gets to the door and looks out through the glass panes.

Can’t see a thing.

She lifts the slinged hand up and turns the doorknob. Then kicks the door open and bursts out onto the deck in the shooting position. Swings right—nothing. Swings left—

The raccoon scrambles down the steps.

“Shit,” Letty says.

Puffs a long sigh and gets her breath back.

Then she laughs at herself and makes a note to get bungee cords for the garbage cans.

Shuts the door and starts to go back to bed.

But her arm’s hurting so she goes into the bathroom, turns on the light and takes a couple more Vikes.

Turns off the light and goes back to bed.

Lev’s pressed against the corner of the house.

He watches the light come on and then go off again.

Nicky watches Paul Gordon walk out of the Starbucks with a cappuccino in his hand. Arrogantly oblivious to the possibility that the world might injure him.

The driver trails him across the almost empty parking lot toward the bank where Gordon walks up to the automatic teller, rests his cappuccino on the ledge, puts in his card and taps his foot while the machine hums.

Nicky watches from the backseat as Dani lowers the front passenger window and rests the machine pistol on the edge.

Gordon gets his cash, grips his two hundred bucks in one hand and his coffee in the other and turns into the spray of bullets that smash into his chest. The cappuccino splashes all over his bloodstained shirt as he falls to the hot asphalt.

“You’re fired,” Nicky says.

Teddy Kuhl’s doing the smart thing.

He’s running.

Since motherfucking Deputy Dawg’s parting shot that Teddy sang like a bird, Teddy knows it’s only a matter of time before one of his tightest buddies rats him out to the Russians.

Teddy knows that he is just cash on the hoof.

So, hurting as he is, he nuts it up, packs a few things, gets on his bike and heads east until this shit cools off. He’s thinking maybe Arizona.

He is doing a very smart thing.

Then he does a very stupid thing.

He stops for a beer.

Stupider than that, he stops for a beer at a bikers bar called Cook’s Corner, out by Modjeska Canyon. Teddy’s thinking he needs a beer, maybe, and this is the last good beer spot for many dry and lonely miles.

The beer tastes so good to him he goes for another.

Gets laughing with some buddies and ends up having five.

Doesn’t even notice one of his boys on the phone.

Beer number seven, he decides it’s time to hit the road and get out of Dodge, but he needs to take a piss first. Beer bladder pressing down on him like a fifty-pound weight.

So he slides off the stool, pushes the metal door into the men’s room and steps up to the stainless-steel trough.

All by his lonesome in there.

George Thorogood song blaring from inside the bar—Teddy’s kind of rocking to it as he unzips his fly and lets loose.

“Aaaaaahhhhh.”

Hitter steps out from a stall, puts the pistol to the back of Teddy’s head and pulls the trigger.

Teddy dies with what’s left of his face in the urinal.

Right next to that little white sponge thing.

Judge John Bickford gets an anonymous phone call at home, informing him that his years of devoted service to the plaintiff’s bar have been duly noted. That an informant has in fact duly noted it to the California Attorney General’s office, and that a story will appear in tomorrow’s Orange County
Register
linking him to a murdered Paul Gordon and Paul Gordon to the Russian Mafia.

Bickford says goodbye to his wife and drives to a motel in Oceanside where he tranquilizes himself with twelve-year-old scotch and Valium and, in the small hours of the morning, slashes his wrists.

The newspaper story never appears.

Retired Justice Dennis Mallon gets a similar phone call and catches a flight to Mexico with a connection to Grand Cayman. He has a home there.

Dr. Benton Howard steps off a curb into an oncoming car. His injuries are so real that he dies of them.

Word hits the street by morning that Howard was an informant working with the Anti-ROC Task Force.

Which is working like a mother.

In what will become known in law enforcement circles as the St Petersburg Day Massacre, Young’s troops roll up Tratchev’s brigade like it’s the freaking Republican Guard.

Tratchev’s guys are caught flat-footed. They’re grabbed in bars, they’re grabbed in their homes, they’re grabbed in bed with their girlfriends.

Viktor Tratchev is having a quiet evening at home watching
Cops
on the Fox network when the door comes crashing in and Special Agent Young comes through with a shotgun in his hands like he’s Robert Stack. Tratchev is annoyed because he thought he had guards out there, but the guards now have their hands behind their backs and plastic ties around their wrists, so technically speaking they’re not really guards anymore.

“
Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?”

Tratchev reaches for his glasses.

Which is a mistake, because one of Young’s troops puts two rounds into his chest before Young can scream,
“What the fuck are you doing?!”
but the fact is that the agent knows exactly what the fuck he’s doing.

He’s getting in position for a big payday from Nicky Vale is what he’s doing.

“What you gonna do when they come for you?”

Jimenez’s boys are romping in L.A.

Up and down Fairfax, they’re crashing in doors, they’re jamming cars into curbs, they’re blocking off alleys and side streets. They’re scooping up car thieves, drive-down artists, extortionists, drug dealers—the whole first and second All-Star Team of Rubinsky’s and Schaller’s best moneymakers.

They get Rubinsky and Schaller, too.

Rubinsky’s in bed with his wife when Jimenez gives him a wake-up
call with a pistol barrel to the back of his neck. Schaller’s playing poker with some buddies when the game comes to a sudden halt.

The sweep misses Kazzy Azmekian.

He’s not at home.

He’s twenty nautical miles off Rosarita on his forty-foot Sportscraft for an overnight fishing trip.

Turns out he can’t swim, because when his trusted bodyguard launches him over the side, Kazzy just sort of goes glug-glug and then disappears into the darkness.

Anyway, between tragic accidents like this and the task force sweep, Nicky Vale’s self-reinvention as a legitimate businessman is pretty much complete.

But not quite.

The noise on the deck wakes Letty up.

Rattling of garbage cans.

“Damn raccoons,” she says as she gets out of bed.

Stumbles for the door and this time doesn’t bother to take her weapon. It’s not like she’s going to shoot the damn thing.

Lev waits by the corner of the deck.

Make it look like a rape, is what the
pakhan
said. Then tear her up with the knife. Just another psycho-sex murder in the Southland. Film at eleven.

He poises the knife in his left hand.

Hears her footsteps.

Hears her open the door.

Sees her step out.

“¡Vamos!”
Letty yells as Lev starts forward.

Something stops him.

A tight cord around his neck pulls him back and down the steps.

Letty hears the raccoon run off and closes the door.

Locks it and goes back to bed.

Whatever the sound was, it’s gone now.

Mother Russia finally gets the children to sleep.

Truth be known, she’ll be happy when Daziatnik rebuilds his own house and moves back in, because while she loves having little Michael with her, the girl Natalie favors her mother and is a real little bitch.

Quite hopeless, really, genetics being what they are.

Michael—Michael will be a little prince.

With some work.

But Natalie …

Mother Russia goes into the bathroom, brushes her teeth, scrubs her face, then takes a brush to her hair.

A hundred strokes, every morning and every night, and that is what will keep it beautiful and full, the way Daziatnik so admires it.

She finishes brushing it and stands back to admire her look in the mirror.

That’s when she sees the man behind her.

It must be one of the new guards.

But the nerve, to come into her bedroom—

“What—” she starts to snap.

Then the man’s hand is over her mouth.

A cloth over her nose.

Then blackness.

Nicky lights up a joint.

Savors the sweet musky scent, takes a deep hit, lets it swirl around in his lungs and then releases it. Feels all the tension go out with the smoke.

All problems dissolving into the night air.

Tratchev dead.

His troops locked up.

Rubinsky and Schaller swept up with their troops.

The late Dr. Benton Howard’s reputation as a police informer firmly established.

Paul Gordon fired.

Kazzy Azmekian is flotsam. Or is it jetsam? Nicky can never remember. Doesn’t matter.

He takes another toke, slips out of his clothes and lets himself ease into the Jacuzzi’s steaming water.

Fifty million dollars coming his way tomorrow. The turnaround in one generation.