"You're getting scared, Tony. You were all right when you were in control, but now you're losing your grip." Leland was still moving. "What makes that, do you think? You ought to have more confidence, figuring how right you are. Or maybe it's because I'm so close to you now. You told me to come up here unarmed and then you blast the elevator you thought I was riding in. You're hiding behind my daughter with a machine pistol and you're shaking in your boots. Where's the Walther you shot Rivers with? That's all anybody needs to know about this. You're the one who brought the machine guns into the building. We were unarmed."
"Are you unarmed?"
"That's what you wanted."
"Well, then, stand up, please. I can hear you without the radio. Turn it off."
Leland turned it off before Taco Bill or anyone else could protest. He still didn't know Tony's location. It didn't matter not yet, anyway: Leland wanted to be sure Stephanie was well clear before he went for the Browning.
"I'm standing up!"
"Hands in the air!"
As Leland raised his arms, slowly, making a show of the pain he really felt, Little Tony emerged from behind the desks on the Wilshire Boulevard side. Leland took a step; he wanted Tony to see him dragging his leg. Tony motioned Stephanie to her feet. She reacted when she saw her father, and Tony grabbed her arm.
"I'm all right, honey," Leland called.
"Very noble, Mr. Leland," Tony said. "Over here, please. You look like a corpse already. Come on. What is the matter with your leg?"
Leland didn't answer. He was making a show of it, listing heavily to the right, which tilted his hand a bit closer to his head. Tony and Steffie were eight to ten feet from the windows, with Leland still too far away to be any kind of shot with the thing Tony carried, still too far to be an easy shot with Leland's Browning. He had always been an excellent marksman; there was some psychological theory about it, having to do with one's sense of self. Stephanie was watching him, but not because she expected him to do something. She started to break down. The last time she had seen him, he had looked human.
"I'm sorry I did this to you, Daddy!"
"The avenger," Little Tony snorted. "Implacable. Your father is a man of infinite illusions. He has a pistol in his collar. The policeman tried to make believe he was unarmed, and now he thinks he is going to be able to save you. He's such a fool. Why should he want to?"
"Out of the way, Steffie!"
"It will give me pleasure to kill both of you," Tony said.
Steffie did not pull away; she threw herself against Tony. It gave Leland the chance to hop forward a few feet more. He wanted her to get clear. This was his job. "Out of the way!"He still had the sun behind him. The pistol came out of position just as he'd planned, tape swirling around it. Tony had his eyes on him as he struggled against Steffie. Leland was close enough. He turned and offered his profile, shooting the way he had been taught decades ago, the old-fashioned way, bringing his arm down smoothly, aligned, a piece of machinery. The first shot was the one most pure, unaffected by recoil, and Leland wanted to hit Tony amidships, where the impact would do the most good.
"Kill him, Daddy! Kill him!"She swung at Tony, hitting him in the face. He was turning the machine pistol toward her when Leland fired, hitting him in the right nipple. He looked at Leland incredulously as Leland's second shot hit him in the shoulder, wrenching him back. Stephanie swung at him again.
"Get clear, baby! I got him and he knows it! "Tony shot her once in the lower abdomen, not letting go of her wrist. She turned to Leland as Tony tried to aim the machine pistol at him.
"Shoot him! He told me he was going to do this!"She pushed against Tony again. Leland shot a third time and missed. Eight left. Tony backed up, holding Stephanie. Leland reset himself and started shooting again. The first hit Tony in the stomach, three inches above the navel. Leland squeezed another, driving Tony back against the glass. The third shot was between the other two, and went clean through him, turning the window white. Tony was still clinging to Stephanie, falling backward. Leland fired three more times, not missing, almost cutting him in half.
Tony fell against the window, pushing it out with his back, holding onto Stephanie by her wrist, then hooking her wristwatch with a ringer, falling out, pulling her out with him. He was already dead; Leland heard Stephanie scream all the way down.
Outside, people shouted and cheered. Leland screamed, too, holding Stephanie's cry long after it would have disappeared from the earth forever.
...10:38 A.M., PST...
And he kept screaming, staring at the open window, at the brilliant sky beyond. He turned the gun around and looked into the barrel, screaming if she had done what he had told her to do, she would be alive, unharmed.
She should have trusted him.
She hadn't even listened to him. "Shoot him, Daddy," she had yelled.
"Steffie!"What did he do now? What was expected of him, the trained dog? The crowd was still shouting, yelling. What did they have on their minds? Did they want more blood or money?
Were they angry because they thought they weren't going to get the money? He did not want to go to the window. He did not want to see what had happened down below but just as much, he did not see the necessity for letting anyone know he had survived.
He did not know that he had. He did not know if he cared. He did not know if caring mattered.
He had not moved. He recognized what he was feeling. He had felt it when his mother had died, when his marriage had broken up, and again when Karen had died, the feeling that it was time to quit, that he would be better off dead. It was on him all over again, as if it had never gone really far away after all. Something in us always wanted to die. No forgiveness never any forgiveness in life. What did it say of a man, if he outlived all the women who had ever loved him? A man like him, with a gun in his hand? What did a gun mean, except death?
He shuffled back to the east side of the building and picked up the radio.
"...inside. Joe, if you can hear me, repeating, we are inside and some of the hostages are beginning to reach us."
He decided to leave the radio on. From the street came a voice calling for the money. What did they used to call those guys at the ballpark? Leather lungs. Six million dollars. For arms. Guns. Shoot him, Daddy.Millions for a bridge. Millions upon millions as if there were some use at all to the money madness and the hoarding up of treasure. As if it could add a day to your life. As if you could eat more than two eggs in the morning, Steinbeck once said, which was all you needed to know about the limits of life. What had Stephanie been looking for? What lessons in life had made her believe in it? What had made Little Tony believe in revolution?
Six million dollars. The president of Klaxon was down in the street, looking at the ruin of his corporate headquarters and wondering if his insurer was going to bug out on him. Leland had worked for an insurance company, so he knew it was damned well going to try. Insurrection? Act of war? No, the arms deal itself, which, because it was outside the law, voided Klaxon's coverage. It made Leland smile. How much pain can you inflict on an oil company? How much could it absorb, before the stockholders insisted on people going to jail? He had two rounds left in the Browning, all he needed. Merry Christmas, everybody.He started up the stairs again, crying like a child.
In her childhood, he and Steffie played checkers and Monopoly. She'd been born at the start of the war, and he had seen little of her the first four years of her life, one separation lasting almost two years. When he came home, he and Karen tried to make it up to her, sensing that she had been damaged by the war as much as them, but in ways no one could see. They tried to make it up to her... What you don't know in all your worry and concern is that later in your life the memories that matter most are of ordinary life. Checkers and Monopoly. Their relationship had fallen apart again while he'd been drinking, but when she had come to recognize that he'd stopped for good, it had grown better. He hadn't liked her husband, Gennaro.