Pike glanced down at Darko again, but saw Frank and Cindy. Frank, Cindy, and their two little boys.
Cole stepped up beside him, and put a hand on Pike’s shoulder.
“We’re done. You got him.”
Pike followed his friend out of the brush.
Part Five. Rest
45
CINDY’S SISTER ARRANGED THE memorial. She did not know Pike, Jon Stone, or Frank’s friends from that earlier time, so Pike was not invited. Cole saw a notice for the memorial when he read the Meyer family’s obituary. The obituary was published as a sidebar to a longer article in the Los Angeles Times about East European gang wars, the death of Milos Jakovich, and the conviction and sentencing of Michael Darko to three consecutive life sentences for the murders of Earvin Williams, Jamal Johnson, and Samuel Renfro, as well as the murders they committed on Darko’s behalf. Darko did not stand trial. He accepted a plea agreement that let him escape the death penalty. The obituary noted that a memorial for the Meyers would be held at the United Methodist church in Westwood on an upcoming Sunday.
Cole pointed out the memorial.
“You should go.”
“I don’t know.”
Pike told Jon Stone about it, and asked if he would go, but Stone refused, not because he didn’t care about Frank, but because he hated funerals. They made him depressed, and he always showed up drunk.
Pike decided to go. He wore a black suit over a black shirt and black silk tie. Frank, Cindy, Little Frank, and Joey were represented by poster-sized photographs set up on easels, along with an enormous blowup of a family portrait.
The people in attendance were mostly Cindy’s family, but a significant number were people who knew the Meyers from school, their business, and church. Two cousins from Frank’s side showed up, both listless men with scabbed hands and coarse skin who looked like they worked hard for a living. They attended only because they brought Frank’s mother-an overweight woman of meager means who had difficulty walking. She sat in a front pew with the two awkward cousins as if she was out of place, and knew it. Her clothes were cheap, and her hair was bad, and when the memorial was over she would go back to her trailer in San Bernardino.
Pike introduced himself, and shook her hand.
“Frank was my friend. We were in the service together.”
“This is so terrible. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“I’m sorry about your son.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Pike shook other hands. When people asked, he told them he knew Frank from the service, but didn’t say where or when, and provided no details. These people knew the Frank they wanted to know, and the Frank that Frank and Cindy wanted them to know. Pike was fine with it.
Pike left in the middle of the service, and drove to Frank’s house. The yellow tape was down, and someone had replaced the broken front door. A For Sale sign had sprouted on the front lawn.
Pike took off his jacket and tie, then rolled his sleeves. He let himself through the side gate, walked around to the back, then stood beneath the huge maple tree beside the still pool. The relatives would be through the house soon, dividing and sharing the mementos, deciding what to do with the possessions. Pike went to the French doors, but did not enter. He had what he wanted. He peered into Frank’s house, then faced the pool and the trees. It was easy to imagine Frank tossing his sons in the air, but imagining it didn’t make him hurt less.
Pike returned to his Jeep, and turned toward the ocean. He followed Sunset Boulevard west, through Brentwood and the Palisades to the Pacific Coast Highway, then up the coast toward Malibu. The ocean was gray, and crowded with sailboats and surfers, come out on the weekend to play.
Pike turned up into Malibu Canyon, and drove for a while, leaving the people and houses behind. He found a gravel fire road, and drove until he came to a bluff deep in the hills with no one else around. Pike shut off his Jeep, then got out and stood on the earth.
One night four men Frank Meyer did not know and to whom he had no connection entered his home. They killed Frank, his family, and everything he held dear. Frank was left with nothing except how he lived, and how he died.
Frank Meyer’s fingerprints were found on Earvin “Moon” Williams’s pistol. A postmortem examination of Williams’s elbow revealed that the ulnar collateral ligament was ruptured, along with cracks in both the ulna and radius in the forearm. The break in the radius bone was of the “green wood” variety, and damaged the surrounding tissue so severely that blood pooled in the joint until the time of Williams’s death. This was how Pike wanted to remember his friend. Chubby, out of shape, and a dozen years out of the game, Frank had moved to defend his family, engaged a superior force, and lost his life in the effort. Frank the Tank to the end.
Pike returned to the Jeep and opened a gun case on the backseat. He took out his pistol and three speed-loaders, two of which were already charged with six bullets, and one which was only half loaded.
Pike raised the Python, fired six times, then reloaded. He fired six more shots, reloaded, then did it again, and finally a last time, firing only three shots. Twenty-one shots, in all.
“Good-bye, Frank.”
Pike put his gun away, and drove the long road home.
46
THREE WEEKS LATER, one day after they removed the cast from his arm, Michael Darko scowled at the flat, dry fields as they approached Corcoran, California, and thought, This must be the far side of the moon. Darko was surprised that morning when he was herded onto a bus and told he was being relocated to Corcoran State Prison. Darko had spent the past two weeks at Terminal Island, a federal facility he thought would be his home for the next many years. He asked why he was being transferred, but no one offered an answer.
Another inmate on the ride up told him Corcoran was a very bad place with many dangerous people, but now, after four hours in the bus and seeing the prison in the distance, Darko was not so much scared that this place would be dangerous, but disappointed because it was ugly.
After what he had known in Bosnia, American prisons and American prisoners did not frighten him, just as American policemen did not frighten him. Michael Darko had come from a dangerous place, and was, himself, a dangerous man.
Even as the prison grew in the van’s dusty windows, Darko was planning to establish contact with other East European inmates, and forge relationships with the Aryan Brotherhood. Many of these associations were already in place, and would be useful in building an empire.
Ten minutes later, the van entered the facility through a rolling gate, then drove into a small parking area where several guards waited. Darko and the two inmates sharing the ride had to wait for the guards to enter the van and unlock them. Each of the three were wearing hand and ankle restraints, and had been locked to separate seats well out of reach of each other. This was done because violent inmates often tried to kill, maim, fornicate with, and sometimes eat each other on the long drive up to nowhere.
The guards entered the van one by one, unhooked an inmate, and walked him off-one guard per inmate. Darko was taken off last. He gave his guard a merciless leer.
“Home, sweet home! It is a beautiful place, is it not?”
The guard had seen tough-guy swagger before, and paid no attention.
The three new inmates were herded through the admitting process. They were stripped, searched, probed, and X-rayed, then were fingerprinted, photographed, and had a DNA sample removed and recorded. They were sprayed with de-louser, made to shower, and given new clothes and shoes. The clothes and shoes they were wearing when they arrived were discarded. The allowable possessions transferred with them were inspected, logged into their records, and returned.