Still naked, I went through the house, determined that no others had participated in the intrusion, and went out the guest bathroom window. Screened by an overhang of pussy willow I’d had planted for this purpose, I was able to take the sentry by the pool unawares. I used a knife. The integral suppressor on the MP5SD was effective where there were walls to help baffle the noise, but in the open air even a round or two would have been heard by anyone at the front of the property. Still, I miscalculated. Coming up behind the man, I cut once across the back of his right knee; his leg went out and his body dropped, and I stabbed him once in the kidney and once in the side of the neck as he dropped lower still. The first two wounds were inflicted rapidly enough that they elicited nothing but a loud gasp, but the third, which should have pierced horizontally through his windpipe and ended any vocalizations, was off the mark and he managed a gurgled cry. Acting without appropriate forethought, I pushed him into the pool to silence him, forgetting that it was covered. Entangled in the blue plastic sheet, he thrashed loudly. Loud enough to draw whoever had been left in front of the house, but not so loud that I couldn’t hear them coming. The dying man’s struggles had pulled the cover away from the edge of the pool, so I dove in myself, gliding beneath his death throes and the growing red cloud that was spilling from the cover into the water.
Latched onto the ladder at the deep end, I used my knife to create a slit in the cover, which was still fairly taut at that side of the pool, and surfaced far enough to peek through and see two more men come into the backyard. Sensibly, they did nothing to help their coworker, focusing instead on the darker shadows among the foliage, searching for where I might be hidden. But they could not afford to be overly thorough. Though I had a generous full-acre plot, heavily landscaped in a tall and dripping southern style that suited the area where I lived, there were still neighbors. There was little doubt that they were at the limits of their time allowance for this operation, if not already beyond it. And they still needed to collect their dead and transport them for disposal.
Haste made them negligent.
And me, as well.
Letting go the ladder, kicking softly, I circled the edge of the pool just below the surface. Coming back into the shallow end, I waited another moment to be sure that the men were fully engaged trying to haul the dead man from the pool. Their hands were occupied, but I did not wish to make the same mistake they had made when they allowed me to wake. Rather than surfacing entirely, I bobbed only my head above the water-line. My weapon was capable of operating quite efficiently for a limited period while submerged, but I had no desire to subject my eardrums to the shock waves when I pulled the trigger. What I should have been more concerned about was the ammunition I had preloaded into the clips stored with the MP5.
There are those who will say that loading an SMG with hollow-point ammunition is overdoing it, but aside from the fact that the ammunition must be custom made and is somewhat expensive, there are no real drawbacks. It gives an all but absolute guarantee that one’s target will be stopped instantly by a short burst. Expanding and staying inside the body, the bullets transfer all of their kinetic energy to the target. And the typical lack of an exit wound means less mess. Indeed, when I’d shot the two men in my bedroom I’d created virtually no splatter to be concerned over. Nonetheless, I would not, given any other option, use the combination ever again.
I was far more lucky than I deserved to be considering my oversight. The first eight rounds fired without incident. The water disrupted the trajectory of the bullets only minimally, and, at such close range, any loss in velocity was irrelevant. Six of the bullets struck their targets. The men were falling back away from the pool as the bullets forced their inertia upon them; my finger was lightening on the trigger, a scant four ounces of pressure less and the gun would cease to fire, but not before the ninth round hit the water that filled the barrel, the flawed hollow-point mushrooming under the pressure, turning the barrel and suppressor to shrapnel.
As I said, far more lucky than I deserved to be.
A five-inch shard found its way into my abdomen. I was able to remove it myself and stitch the wound closed, but only after I had triggered the timer that would ignite the phosphorous charges set at various key structural points around the house, gotten myself into the well-stocked Series III Land Rover in the garage, and driven five miles so as to be out of the immediate area when emergency vehicles began to arrive.
Doing all this while still nude.
In the end it was a week before I had reasserted control over my survival compulsions to the extent that I was able to comfortably seek medical care within my professional sphere. By then the wound had become horribly infected and I ended up losing several feet of intestine. Smaller shards had peppered my left hand and I permanently lost all feeling in the palm and along the inside of the thumb. Had I been firing the weapon while fully submerged, shouldering the stock as would have been proper, the barrel fragment that caused me a year of severe discomfort would have likely lodged in my brain.
It haunts me still, how close I came to a death that would have registered as little more than blackly humorous. If I dwell on it for any length it is enough to draw me into an instinctive posture of attack. A dangerous memory.
It took almost as long to repair the damage I’d done to my fledgling business concern as it did to heal fully. The competitors who had challenged me were no longer an issue, but they did get one of their wishes.
It was a tightly knit world I worked in; some egos, and a few wallets, needed to be flattered after such a display. I did as much, relocated to Los Angeles, and put out a fresh shingle. Perfectly happy to leave town in the end. But when I moved into my new home, I forewent any security measures. They had, I felt, made me more vulnerable than safe. Instilled a false sense of security. A few good locks and a fraudulent sticker declaring that my home was “protected by armed security” were enough for common housebreakers. As for my peers, I could think of no measures that could keep them from going about their business should it come to that again. Short of succumbing to my compulsion and retreating to the woods to live in a cave, there was no level of safety that could put me entirely at ease. Which was as it should be.
My home became a spiderweb of sorts. An elaborately arranged mosaic of architecture, landscaping, and possessions. Strictly organized, my familiarity with the placement and resonance of every element was literally sensuously intimate. I could, without exaggeration, feel when everything was right with my home, as well as when discordance intruded. It took little more than a raccoon crossing the deck and upsetting a planter in my herb garden for me to wake from a sound sleep.
So it was not by sheer surprise that I was taken when I returned home from Culver City very early that morning, but rather by overwhelming force.
15
THERE WAS NO BAG ON THE HEAD THIS TIME. INSTEAD HE waited to be booked at the front desk by a level III reserve officer showing clear early indications that she was sleepless.
A skinny black man in an orange jumpsuit, the slack in his ankle chains looped around the leg of a heavy wood bench bolted to the floor, eye-balled him and grunted loudly.
“I know you? Yeah, I know you. I know you? Yeah, I think I know you.”