The Triggerman Dance Read online

  chapter 31

  He set the Hughes down in a small vacant field on Bolsa, not far; from Little Saigon. It was private property and he knew the owner, knew his chopper would be safe there behind the chain link fence with the concertina wire on top and the patrolling Dobermans the owner would release when they were off the lot.

  He saw the two command and control vans—orange at black, clean and waxed to a finish that reflected the streetlight along the avenue—waiting on the street at the far end of the lot. He jogged across the barren dirt, waving John toward the vans. The young man looked perplexed but game. Holt could feel his heart beating evenly in his chest, and a growing affection for his newest apostle, whose lanky body and long coat moved through the darkness behind him.

  He saw four of his lieutenants standing outside the vehicles, arms crossed, waiting for him. There stands justice, he thought: Kettering, Stanton, Summers and Alvis. The best of the best. Holt Men. The Men. They were in standard patrol uniform—black pants and boots, short-sleeved button-down black shirts over Kevlar vests, bold orange neckties knotted in half-windsors and tucked into the shirts just below the third button. Each wore the sidearm they were licensed to carry on the job, and the hip radio ammunition belt, flashlight and handcuffs.

  Holt's eyes were strong now and Clarity informed every movement of his body, every thought that issued from his mind. He slipped into the Kevlar vest offered by Summers. He cinch the shoulder holster over it, slid out the .45 Colt Gold Cup with which he was certifiably lethal, checked the clip, jacked a round into the chamber, safed it and set it back into the leather.

  "What's the word from Terry?" he asked. Terry, the ersatz fence, Terry the mole, Terry the confidant of the Bolsa Cobra Boys who were the mark tonight.

  "Terry says we're on," said Alvis. "Sometime after midnight. Six of them."

  "How's the family doing?"

  "The girls are with friends. Mr. and Mrs. were having dinner when we left. They're scared and they're laughing a lot."

  "Good," said Holt. "This is John Menden. Friend of the family. Good guy. May be working with us in the future."

  The Men shook hands with John.

  "Nice work, what you did out in Anza," offered Stanton.

  John thanked him.

  Holt could sense that they were mildly surprised, certainly wondering about Fargo, but saw no need to explain. There's plenty of room in the world for good Men, he thought. Someday there was bound to be a changing of the guard.

  He climbed into the first van, motioning John to follow. Summers drove and Alvis sat in the back with John. Holt watched the bright lights of Little Saigon pass by on either side, saw the noodle shops and cafes, the empty parking lots littered with flyers, the steel gratings behind the shop windows, the young people still out walking. He turned and spoke to John:

  "Our clients are the Vu-Minh family. He's a dentist; she's a lawyer. Been in the country since 1974. Two daughters. Bright and beautiful. The Bolsa Cobras picked them for obvious reasons—nice house, plenty of income. Upper middle class and unsuspecting. We've got a man close to them. Now, we're going to let them move in, start their thing, then kick their fucking butts."

  "How many men will you use?"

  "Six, including you, inside. Five pursuit vehicles with two men each and the two vans, which are about to get fresh crews. One helicopter, in case things fall apart. Stay close to me and do what I say. Don't do anything else. Clear?"

  "Yes, sir."

  They pulled along the curb ten minutes later. The house was in an older suburban neighborhood shaded by jacaranda trees that threw dark profiles against a darker sky. Holt looked up to the stars beaming in the cloudless night. He walked up the driveway toward the house. He saw two more of his Men coming from the front door, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Vu-Minh. New Men, he noted: Rodgers and Mason. He stopped as they approached, but said little more than a short hello to Allen and Joan Vu-Minh. Stanton had already told them what would happen, and this was no time for elaborate Asian pleasantries.

  He stood in the doorway of the home and watched the two command and control vans slide off toward the avenue. He closed the door and locked it. He watched Kettering place the long canvas bag on the carpet and distribute the four semi-automatic shotguns, keeping one for himself. He smelled the sweet aroma of mint and noted the plate of spring rolls left by Joan Vu Minh on the living room coffee table. A pot of tea and six small cups sat beside them. He noted the lacquer paintings on the walls—romanticized treatments of pre-war Saigon, pastoral scenes from the Vietnamese countryside. The furniture was modest and tasteful, with Asian accents incorporated into Western design.

  The home brought contradictory feelings to Holt, a state of mind with which he was never comfortable. It was obvious that Vietnam needed people like Allen and Joan Vu-Minh more than the United States did. The land needed its people and the people their land. It was also possible that the Vu-Minhs would have been persecuted—perhaps executed—if they had stayed behind after the fall. More to the point, they were citizens of the republic now and they deserved justice.

  He dispatched Summers, Stanton, Alvis and Kettering to their positions: two in one of the girl's bedrooms and two in the other.

  He took John into the living room, made sure the drapes o the windows were closed, then turned off all the lights except on in the kitchen. In the faint houselight he motioned John, then moved down a hallway and into the Vu-Minhs' master bedroom He turned on a lamp and moved two chairs against the far wall, beside the light switch, facing the door. He turned off the lamp and moved in darkness to the chairs. He sat and flipped the light switch on and off three times.

  "Sit next to me," he ordered John. "Listen. The Bolsa Cobras have a little different routine from other Vietnamese home invaders. They don't like daylight hours. The last three jobs they pulled were done around two a.m. They pick a door lock— usually the front door—let themselves in and catch the victims sleeping. Tie them up at gunpoint. Take them into a bathroom, fill the tub and dunk the woman's head until the man tells them where the cash and jewelry are. If the man won't tell, they dunk him and work the wife. If she won't tell, they ransack the place. They haven't hit families with kids, yet. They like older people, people with savings. You know the Vietnamese don't trust cash and don't trust banks, so they keep lots of Krugerrands and jewelry. Keep it at home. They also don't trust the law. Allen and Joan are known to have money. They do charity work. They drive expensive cars. They make the papers. So the Bolsa Cobras have decided to branch out and try a younger family with kids. They usually work in pairs. They've bulked up to six for this one. They'll be full of adrenaline. Nervy. Quick."

  "Will they shoot when they see us instead of a sleeping couple?"

  "They won't know what hit them."

  Holt sat in the darkness and listened to the blood moving through his body. He tried to feel the bad cells replicating but he could not. His eyes were strong again—they were always strong when he was doing justice—and even in the dark it was easy to become familiar with the room. He could smell Mrs. Vu-Minh's perfume mixed with the fresh odor of soap that moved in from the bath. He thought about those early years with Carolyn, when he'd graduated from law school and entered the Bureau. Just them in the little apartment in McLean, the Bureau training programs, the long Sunday dinners at the Fish Market with some of the other trainees. His favor in the eyes of Walker Frazee, who brought him along and sent him west as soon as he could because Frazee was a Mormon and a family man too and he knew how badly Holt wanted to be back in the land that had bred him. Holt chose not to think of his excommunication when he renounced the church those many years later, when Patrick's death had turned loose all that was furious and secular and ungodly inside him, when he had been unable to sense the presence of God anywhere upon the earth, in any form. Holt did not think of that. Instead, he thought of Patrick's birth and the overwhelming, unforeseeable pride he felt when he first took Pat's little body into his arms. He thought of the way that
Carolyn looked when she was feeding their infant son, her hair up and her robe open around her breast and the aura of wisdom that had surrounded her ever since she had become a mother. It was as if she had connected with something inside her that he—and even Carolyn herself—had never known was there. He thought of Pat's first steps, the funny little outfits Carolyn always got for him, the evolution of the boy's smile from gummy toothlessness to the manly assurance of Patrick, age twenty-two, graduating from college. He thought of Valerie's premature birth, the natural debut of her headstrong personality. He pictured her with the little ribbon taped to her head at Patrick's insistence because she was born bald and Pat thought a girl needed a ribbon, hair or not. He remembered the time at the breakfast table one Saturday when Valerie announced that Pat had dreamed the night before about driving a car and she knew this because she had been in the back seat. He could see her shooting her first round of trap at age six—she knocked down four—and how proud he was that she stood like him on the trap range, brought her gun up like he did, called for the bird like he did, held her gun at rest like he did, set her empties back into the ammo pouch like he did. He remembered her coming down the stairs for her junior prom and ho she seemed to contain enough life and beauty to animate a dozen young girls all at once. He thought of all these things and marveled that the world had stripped so much away but left him standing. He could feel the great fury that animated him in slumber, resting. He understood that he now had, in John, an avenue to Susan Baum. He could feel things beginning to end.

  He looked at John in the darkness. The young man sat erect in the chair, his long coat parted to each side, his fedora placed squarely on his head, no angle, no comment implied. He was taller than Pat, and thinner, but John had the same strong profile and calm eyes of his son. He seemed so far away in his closeness not blood but something akin to blood. Spirit, he thought? A kindred spirit? He wondered if he was imagining things for John that were foolish to imagine, if he was ascribing an inflated value to hope. He wondered, briefly, if perhaps there was a God who looked over the affairs of men, and had arranged John in his path as a sort of salvation. No, he decided. No.

  "Did Jillian come back and talk to you after she died?"

  John was quiet for a long beat. He didn't move. "I thought I heard her voice in the wind once, but it was just the wind."

  "How did you know it was just the wind?"

  "I listened hard."

  "I read a lot after Pat died. Voices from the grave. Spirit communication. All that. I tried my best to be open. Keep my senses ready for him. Never really happened. I figured maybe he was talking to Carolyn. I was always tone deaf."

  "Those ideas aren't for everybody, Mr. Holt. I don't think it's a measure of your soul, how much you think you hear the dead."

  "Ever dream about her?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Me too. Sometimes I'd wake up laughing. Or crying. Or screaming. He seemed so real, then."

  "Maybe that was his way of talking to you."

  "Anything's possible. Though I never took much heart in that banality."

  "Me neither. What I wanted most was just one minute to see her again, to say good-bye."

  Holt listened to a car pass by on the street outside. "That was a nice thing you did for Carolyn tonight." He shuddered, though, when he thought of her taking the four majestically pathetic steps.

  "I'm not sure what to do."

  "Let her call you Pat. No harm I can see."

  "Just as long as .. . well ... I don't disappoint her."

  "She's never looked better. Since the bullet, I mean."

  "Makes me feel dishonest."

  "Small price."

  "True."

  "The thing I like best about these kind of stakeouts is really nailing the sons of bitches. Law enforcement, you can't set up a situation like this. There's no manpower for it. And the courts would murder you."

  "How many have you done?"

  "Two hundred and four."

  Holt felt the telephone throb against his chest. He brought it out and listened. Carfax, one of the Holt Men assigned to the juniper hedge across the street, told him a car had passed once and was now about to pass again. Holt radioed Summers and Alvis.

  "I think we're on," he said to John. He nodded to the window, where headlights gently illuminated the blinds in a moving, horizontal line.

  He put the phone back in his pocket, took out his .45 and breathed deeply.

  "Silence, son."

  It was ten minutes later that the Bolsa Cobra Boys came through the front door. Holt could hear the pick inside the lock, the furtive anxiety of the picker, the impatience, then finally the tumble of the steel. When the door opened he could feel the change of pressure in the air. He could hear the shoes—sounding like so many—on the linoleum of the entryway, then the muffled sound of shoes on carpet, then the quickening report on the hallway tiles. Whispers. Answers. Whispers again. Suddenly the beam on a flashlight hit the far wall and they were in the room. Three, four, six. They filed in with a kind of organized hush and as the flashlight beam trailed along the walls toward him Holt stood, hit the light switch and extended his automatic straight toward the hand with the flashlight in it.

  "Don't move," he said calmly.

  Holt allowed his eyes to scan them all but focus on none. And, just as he thought, at least two of the kids were moving their guns toward him. He shot the hand that held the flashlight and the metal and bone and flesh exploded and the boy screamed. All six of them leaned back toward the door like sea grass swayed by a current but it was too late. Alvis blasted them from behind with two deafening roars from his shotgun—beach sand instead of lead, but painful inside of ten feet—and the whole contingent accordioned in upon itself while Kettering, Summers and Stanton leaped into the collapsing fray like rodeo cowboys. In less than twenty seconds the Holt Men had five pairs of hands wrenched behind five backs and cinched tight with lacerating plastic ties. Holt pulled the revolver off the kid with the splintered hand, then dragged him into the bathroom and lifted him into the tub so he wouldn't bleed on the carpet anymore. He gave the boy a bath towel and told him to wrap it up tight. Back in the bedroom he looked down at the five trussed gangsters and the five guns—a sawed-off shotgun and four automatics—that the Holt Men had kicked against the closet door. He looked at John, who still stood in front of his chair with the .45 dangling from his right hand and a look of bewilderment on his face.

  Holt smiled at him. There were few moments more pleasurable in life than seeing the look on the face of someone who had just witnessed a Liberty Ops private interdiction action for the first time.

  "Call the police and get an ambulance for the kid in there," he said to Stanton. "John, our part of this procedure is over. Let's go home now. Nice work, men."

  He tossed the boy's revolver into the pile of firearms by the closet door and headed out with John behind him.

  Ten minutes later they were back in the chopper, levitating through the star-studded early morning sky. Holt watched the lights of Little Saigon dissipate below them, then turned his gaze to John.

  He took a long time to assess John Menden—his face and expression, his motives and fears, his capabilities for loyalty and betrayal. His weakness. He waited for these things to manifest. They always did, if you waited and knew how to listen. He could always feel them coming off of people—what kind of heft they had inside, what sense of follow-through they possessed. Whether or not they had bottom. He had always felt it coming off the people he worked with, the creeps he collared, the prosecutors he worked with, the defenders he answered—this silent and inadvertent confession of capacity. It was a glimpse of content.

  They screamed south toward Liberty Ridge. "Smitten by my daughter, aren't you?"

  John seemed to almost choke. He cleared his throat and looked at Holt with a dazed expression.

  "Very much so, sir."

  "Most beautiful thing left on earth. Cat got your tongue?"

  "Just a little. I
've never seen anything quite like that."

  "Anza comes to mind."

  "That was just a reaction. This was . . . surgical."

  "We might have trouble with the kid I shot. Summers will stand in for me on that."

  Holt stared for a moment into the eyes that looked so much like his own, so much like Pat's.

  "John. Call Susan Baum tomorrow and tell her you want to meet with her. Tell her you're interested in working for the paper again. She's afraid, I hear. Not going out much in public. Moving between her home and an apartment in Santa Ana. Ask her t see you as soon as she can. You're hard up—need the steady paycheck again."

  "Why?"

  "I want to talk to her on Liberty Ridge."

  "But how are you going to talk with her, if she's meeting me somewhere?"

  "You will bring her back to the Ridge with you. Simple. You can handle her, can't you?"