The Triggerman Dance

"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.