The Power Of The Dog (77 page)

All in place.

Waiting for the stagecoach.

Which rolls right into the ambush.

O-Bop gets on the phone. “One half-mile out.”

Little Peaches sees the car come past. Lowers his binoculars, hits the cell phone. “Now.”

Callan pulls out onto the highway. “I’m on.”

Peaches: “Got it.”

Mickey starts a new chrono.

Callan sees the car in his rearview mirror and slows down a little and lets it pass him. No one in the car gives him so much as a glance. A lone biker headed south in the predawn darkness. It’s twenty minutes to the empty stretch at Pendleton, where he wants to do it, so he drops back a little but keeps the car’s taillights in sight. The commuter traffic is headed mostly north, not south, and the few cars that are headed their way will thin out even more as they leave the southernmost Orange County town of San Clemente.

They pass Basilone Road, then the famous surfing beaches called Trestles, then the two domes of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, then the Border Patrol checkpoint that blocks off the northbound lanes of the 5 and then it gets empty and quiet. Nothing on their right except sand dunes and ocean, which are now beginning to emerge in the faint light as the rays of the sun start to appear on the left over Black Mountain, which dominates the Camp Pendleton landscape.

Callan has a mike and a headset inside his motorcycle helmet.

He utters a single word: “Go?”

Mickey answers, “Go.”

Callan twists the accelerator, leans forward to cut down the wind resistance and speeds toward the courier car. Pulls beside almost exactly where he’d planned—on the long straightaway just short of the long right curve that sweeps toward the ocean.

The driver sees him at the last possible second. Callan sees his eyes widen in surprise, and then the car lurches forward as the driver steps on the gas. He’s not worried about getting stopped by a cop now, he’s worried about getting killed, and the Beamer surges ahead.

Momentarily.

This is why they got the Harley, right? This is why they bought the hog, basically an engine with two wheels and a seat attached to it. The fucking Harley ain’t gonna lose to no yuppie-mobile. And it sure ain’t gonna lose to no yuppie-mobile with two million dollars in cash for the taking.

So when the Beamer hits seventy, Callan hits seventy.

When it hits eighty, Callan hits eighty.

Ninety, ninety.

When it slides into the far right lane, Callan slides with it.

Back left, back left.

Back right, back right.

Beamer hits the hundred mph mark, Callan hits the century mark.

And now he lets his adrenaline loose. It’s pumping through his veins like fuel through the bike’s engine. Bike, engine, rider, adrenaline singing now, sailing, flying, Callan is in the zone now—pure adrenaline speed rush as he pulls even with the Beamer and the driver yanks the steering wheel to the left to try to ram him and almost does and Callan has to pull out and he almost loses it. Almost loses it at one hundred per, which would send him spinning out on the concrete, where he’d be just a smear of blood and tissue. But he rights the bike and pulls it behind the Beamer, which now has a ten-yard lead and then the back window opens and a Mac-10 peeks out and starts shooting like a tail gunner.

But maybe Peaches was right—even in a car you can’t hit shit at that speed, and anyway Callan is leaning left and right, swaying the bike back and forth and the guys in the Beamer figure that ain’t gonna work and they got a better chance with the gas pedal so they push it.

The Beamer hits 105, 110, and pulls ahead.

Even the Harley ain’t gonna catch it.

Which is why Callan hit it where he did—because the straightaway ends in that gigantic sharp outside curve that the Beamer isn’t going to handle at eighty, never mind a buck ten. That’s the fucking thing about physics—it’s uncompromising, so either the driver slows down and lets the shooter on the bike catch him or he goes flying off the road like a jet on a carrier deck, only this jet can’t fly.

He decides to take his chances with the shooter.

Wrong choice.

Callan slides to the left, his foot nearly scraping the concrete. He comes out of the top side of the curve even with the driver’s window and the driver freaks when he sees the .22 come up near his face. Callan fires one shot to spiderweb the window, then—

Pop pop.

Always two shots, right together, because the second shot automatically corrects the first. Not that it needs to in this instance; both shots go dead center.

The two .22 rounds are zipping around in the guy’s brain like the balls in a pinball machine.

That’s why the .22 is Callan’s weapon of choice. It’s not powerful enough to blast a round through a skull. Instead, it sends the bullet bouncing around inside the brainpan, frantically looking for an exit, lighting all the lights and then putting them out.

Game over.

No bonus play.

The Beamer whips into serial 360s and then goes off the road.

Stays on its feet, though—fine German engineering—but the two passengers are still in shock from whiplash as Callan pulls the bike over and—

Pop pop.

Pop pop.

Callan pulls back onto the highway.

Three seconds later, Little Peaches pulls in behind the Beamer. Gets out of his car with a shotgun in his left hand, just in case, walks up and opens the driver’s door. Leans across the dead driver and takes the keys from the ignition. Walks to the back of the car, takes the briefcases from the trunk, gets back into his car and pulls out.

There must be a dozen cars spread out on the highway that see pieces of this scene, but none of them stop or pull over because Little Peaches is in a California Highway Patrol car and a CHP uniform, so they have to figure he has it under control.

He does.

Gets back in the cruiser and calmly drives south. He ain’t worried about getting stopped by a real cop, because moments before, right by Mickey’s clock, Big Peaches hit a switch on a radio-control transmitter and in a vacant lot a half-block away an old Dodge van went up like an octogenarian’s birthday cake and as Big Peaches pulls out for his next task he already hears the sirens screeching in his direction. He drives to the parking lot of a municipal golf course in north Oceanside and is sitting there when Little Peaches pulls in. Little Peaches takes the briefcases, gets out of the fake cop car and gets in with Peaches. As Little Peaches struggles out of his cop’s uniform they drive toward the Oceanside Transportation Center.

O-Bop has passed the crashed Beamer, so he knows that at least part of the job has gone off, so he drives to the Highway 76 exit. There’s a small dirt lot inside the cloverleaf and that’s where Callan has pulled off. He leaves the Harley and gets in with O-Bop. They drive toward the transport center.

Where Mickey’s waiting in his car.

Eyes on his watch, waiting.

The clock’s running down.

Either the job’s gone okay or his friends are hurt, dead, arrested.

Then he sees Little Peaches pull into the parking lot. They sit in the car until the train is announced and they can see it down the track, coming up from San Diego. Then they get out of their car, wearing conservative suits, each carrying a briefcase and a cardboard cup of coffee and an overnight bag slung over his shoulder, looking just like any other businessmen rushing to catch the train for a meeting in L.A. Mickey slips them their tickets as they walk past the car. They board moments before their trains pull out, and this is why they picked the Oceanside Transportation Center—because as the Amtrak train pulls up from the south, the local commuter train pulls out on a different track, headed south. Peaches takes one briefcase and gets on the L.A.–bound train. His brother takes the other case and heads south for San Diego.

As the trains depart the platforms, Callan and O-Bop pull into the parking lot and get out of the car. Their hair is cut short, Marine-style, and they’re wearing the kind of bad clothes that Marines wear when they’re off-duty. They sling their duffel bags over their shoulders, walk past Mickey’s car and get their tickets and then walk over to the side of the transport station where the buses are parked. Just two more Marines out of Pendleton on leave. O-Bop gets on a bus bound for Escondido, Callan on one headed for Hemet.

Peaches has a ticket for L.A., but he doesn’t take the whole ride. A few minutes south of the Santa Ana station, he goes into the lavatory and changes his clothes from the business geek’s suit into California casual, and he doesn’t come out until the train pulls into the station. Then he gets off at Santa Ana and checks into a motel. Little Peaches does a similar routine, only southbound, getting off in the funky surfing town of Encinitas and checking into one of those old roadside cottage motels across the PCH from the beach.

Mickey, he just drives back to his hotel. He hasn’t been close to the action, and if the cops want to track him down and ask him any questions, he’s got nothing to say anyway. He does his thirty-five per downtown and goes back to bed for a nap.

Callan and O-Bop take their full rides, O-Bop to a No-Tell Motel next to a porn shop, so he’s happy and has things to do while he’s lying low. He checks in, then walks over and buys twenty bucks’ worth of tokens and spends most of the afternoon pumping the coins into the video machines.

Sitting on his bus, Callan tries to forget about having just killed three men, but he can’t. He don’t feel his usual nothin’; he feels something he can’t put a name to.

I forgive you. God forgives you.

Can’t get that shit out of his head.

He gets off his bus and checks into a Motel 6. The room ain’t much, but it does have cable. Callan flops on the bed and watches movies on the television. The room smells of disinfectant, but it beats the Golden West.

The plan is to chill out for a few days, then if everything is cool—and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be—they’re going to meet up at the Sea Lodge in La Jolla, chill out on the beach for a few days, call in some broads (Peaches actually says “broads”) from Haley Saxon, have a party.

Callan remembers the girl he saw there, Nora. Remembers how much he wanted that girl, and how Big Peaches took her away from him. He remembers how beautiful she was, and thinking that if he could somehow touch that beauty it would make his own life less ugly. But that was a long time ago, a lot of blood’s flowed under the bridge since then and it’s not possible that the girl Nora is still in that house.

Is it?

He don’t want to ask, though.

Three days later, Peaches is on the phone like he’s ordering Chinese food: Whaddya want? A blonde, a brunette, how about a black chick? They’re all hanging out in Peaches’ room even though they all have adjoining rooms right on the beach. It’s actually pretty cool, Callan thinks—you step right out of your room and you’re on the beach, and he’s getting off on watching the sun set over the ocean while Peaches is on the phone ordering pussy.

“Whatever,” he tells Peaches.

“And a whatever,” Peaches says into the phone, and then he chases them out because he’s got business to do they don’t need to be a part of. Take a swim, take a shower, have some dinner, get ready for the broads.

Peaches’ business arrives about an hour later, after it’s dark.

They don’t talk a lot. Peaches just hands him a suitcase containing three hundred large in cash as his share for the information.

Art Keller takes the money and leaves.