“Crickets, Liam,” I said. “Guess what? Crickets bring good luck,” and I head-butted his fat Irish nose into pulp.
He dropped his revolver and grabbed at his face. Blood spurted between his knuckles.
Footsteps pounded up the trail, mixed with the faint wail of sirens.
“Liam, someone’s coming! We gotta split!” Roach yelled.
“Shoot this bastard,” Liam screamed. He blindly reached for the.38 and hurled it at Roach, who ducked instinctively as the loaded weapon arced over his head and landed behind him somewhere in the dark. The night lit up with a thunder-crack as the gun discharged on impact. The siren wails strengthened, and Roach took off again back down the trail.
If I weren’t lashed to a tree, with Norman gone and Liam wanting me dead next, I’d have maybe even enjoyed this three-ring circus.
Liam lurched up to me and wrapped his meaty hands around my neck. He started to squeeze, each finger an individual steel rod, conducting hurt. Looked like I was going to get my death wish. My eyes bulged. I squirmed and pushed at the ropes, burning and shredding skin. The cords gave maybe another half inch.
In one crazed motion I jammed my right hand down my pant leg, hooked the opener, wrenched it free, and jailhouse-jabbed six quick pops straight into Liam’s neck. The short deep cuts welled with blood, fang bites from my makeshift shank-a two-pronged knuckle-duster.
He howled and now we both heard the thumpa-thumpa of an approaching police chopper, and both saw the searchlight sweeping the area, and finally, finally Liam lumbered off. I waved my free arm and rasped out a yell and the helicopter executed a few turns before it found me and hovered, fixing me in a pool of light.
“Ten? Ten!”
“Over here!” I croaked as I flapped and struggled like a pinned moth.
Bill thrashed his way through the brush, followed by a swarm of uniformed cops and firefighters and ambulance attendants.
“Black Cadillac Escalade!” I called, as best I could. “License MV7XL2P.”
One of the cops spoke into his handheld, and the chopper rose vertically and banked off toward the park entrance.
“There’s a body in the scrub, Bill, maybe twenty feet due north, his name’s Murphy, Norman Murphy, homicide victim, the weapon’s a snubnose, S and W, he tossed it right around here, the shooter, he’s Liam O’Flaherty, and Bill, my phone, can you get it, my new phone is-”
Bill pulled my top half into a fierce hug to shut me up. I gasped, one quick sob, and it was done. He pushed away and busied himself unwinding the cords.
I stomped feeling back into my legs and breathed deep, in and out, in and out, as Bill hit the bushes with his flashlight. He returned with my phone. He raised an eyebrow at its smashed face before handing it over.
“You should have seen the other guy’s phone,” I said.
I pocketed it. Met Bill’s eyes. “Thanks.”
“Thank Julie. Whatever you did to piss her off this time, and I don’t even want to know, she called Martha to vent, and Martha said to just go over and have it out with you in person. That’s why Julie passed your Mustang lying all cockeyed to hell on the side of the road, and you nowhere to be seen. She knew enough to know something was very wrong, so she called me. And I called your phone, with its GPS locator, and here we all are. Smart girl, that Julie.”
An ambulance attendant started swabbing my face. As he butterfly-taped my split lip, one of the cops got off his handheld and waved Bill to his side. They talked quietly for a minute. Bill rejoined me.
“They found the Escalade,” Bill said. “It went off road, about two miles north of here. Did a nose dive into the canyon.”
“Good.”
“Not good. The Escalade didn’t skid off the shoulder, Ten. It was pushed. No sign of any driver, or passengers. Not there. Not anywhere.”
“But how did they …”
Bill just looked at me, with something like compassion.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “They took the Mustang.”
CHAPTER 27
I caught a ride home from one of the cops. As I let myself in, all my nerve cells clicked off, like a SWAT team standing down. The adrenaline and cortisol drained from my limbs, taking with them any ability to function. I was too tired to eat, too tired to shower, too tired to call John D with the bad news. I fell into bed like the dead man I very nearly had been two hours earlier.
And came wide-awake two hours later. It was three in the morning. The witching hour.
The hour is upon us. Life everlasting for they that believe.
I slipped out of bed, pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of running pants, and stepped onto the deck.
The neighborhood was dead quiet. An owl hooted, a mournful call from another hillside. Through scattered shreds of cloud, the waning moon cast a faint, oily sheen on the ocean. I pressed three fingers to my neck. The skin was sore to the touch. Liam’s flushed face swam before me, eyes flat with hate.
There’s a lot of money at stake here, boyo.
My landline rang inside the house. The hour is upon us. I hurried inside to answer.
“Ten? It’s John D.”
Of course it was.
“John D,” I said. “So you know.”
“I hate to trouble you this time of night,” John D said, as if he didn’t hear me. “But there’s something doing next door.”
An icy finger wormed up my back. “Go on.”
“I woke up a few hours ago, felt like I’d been punched in the gut or something, and I couldn’t fall back asleep. I was just laying in bed, worrying about nothing, and that’s when I heard it. A chopper, Ten, seemed like right on top of me. ’Course I went outside for a look-see. Turns out it was landing in them hippies’ field.”
“Police raid?”
“That’s what I was thinking, but fifteen minutes later it took off again, and I got a good look at it. It was an old Huey, a big one. And then, ’bout thirty-five minutes later, it came back.”
A muffled pounding, like a massive drumbeat, swelled in volume through the phone line.
“There she goes,” John D yelled. “I’m going over to take a look.” And he hung up.
I ran to unlock the safe. And stared at the empty canvas Wilson kit. My prized gun was in the glove box of my prized Shelby, and my prized Shelby was gone. There was no time to even process my feelings, attached or otherwise.
I grabbed the Glock and an extra clip. Then I called Mike.
“Yo,” Mike said.
“I hope you’re good at geometry,” I said. “Point A is the Children of Paradise. Point B is however far a transport helicopter can fly in fifteen minutes, twenty max. It’s a Huey, and probably loaded down, so take that into consideration when you calculate radius and circumference. Oh, yeah, and it has to be somewhere remote. Mike, I need to know where that chopper is landing.”
“Is this going to be on the final?”
“Do it now, Mike!” I said. “People are going to die.”
I ran to the Toyota and prayed it would hold together one more time. As I careened down Topanga, I pushed away the image of my Mustang, smashed at the bottom of some cliff, my beautiful custom Wilson locked inside. At least I still had …
And realized I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Tank. I had no idea where he was. I was three for three.
This was turning into a bad, bad night.
I left a message on Julie’s machine. I had to.
“Julie, I can’t talk now, but will you please go back to the house and look for Tank? If he’s gone underground, he won’t come out for just anybody. Use tuna water.”
I covered the 70 miles in just over an hour. Don’t ask me how. As I smoked past Paradise, sure enough, a big transport helicopter lifted off the field and banked south. I floored it to John D’s farmhouse and jumped out just as he limped his way across the field to me.
“I think that was the last load,” he panted. “The place is quiet as a tomb. What the hell happened to your face?”