Fifteen years ago he had walked away from San Quentin after two years inside for the theft of a motorcycle. It made him laugh. As a teenager he had committed assault, rape, murder, mayhem, but they put him away for breaking a showroom window and riding off on a Harley. Since then he had never done anything so paltry.
First he formed the Outlaws. With this gang of psychos and misfits, he pretty soon whipped the other motorcycle outfits into line.
They took on the West Coast syndicate for the control of the heroin trade in San Bernardino County, and they won. Then they took a big piece of the Los Angeles trade from the black and Chicano gangs.
But tonight was different. Tonight was not some gang war for a few thousand dollars a week in heroin profits.
Tonight would be for millions.
As the tug and barges left Wilmington Harbor, Chief scanned the water and the lights behind them from the pilot's cabin. Nothing moved on the dark break-water. No Coast Guard craft pursued them. No flashing lights from Police or Harbor Master. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes, tried to find the truck docks in the dark mass of wharves and warehouses along the shore. He couldn't see the dock. He buzzed Horse on the hand-radio:
"We're out of the harbor."
"Anything following us?"
"Nah."
Horse pocketed his radio and turned to the other Outlaws in the trailer with him. "We're on our way."
The fifty-odd bikers were packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the tangle of motorcycles and weapons. They cheered, shoving into one another. Some beat their fists on the aluminum sheeting of the trailer. Horse stepped up on a customized chopped Harley, raised his arms for order:
"Shut the fuck up! Trailers full of tomatoes and soda pop don't scream, remember? You want to come this far and get busted? QUIET!"
The trailer fell silent. From the second trailer beside them on the barge, they heard the cheering of the twenty other Outlaws. Horse pulled out the hand-radio and hissed:
"Charlie! Shut them up! Now!"
"Sure, boss. Can we smoke now?"
"No smoking."
"Not even tobacco? I'm having a nicotine fit."
"Cigarettes okay. But no grass, no PCP. And no lights, no cigarettes once we start unloading. You know the plan."
Then he glared at the Outlaws in front of him.
"You heard what I told Charlie. Everyone stays straight until we take the Island. No one leaves the trailers until we dock.
"No cigarettes, no noise, no shooting. Only knives. Me and the guys with silencers will do any shooting. You see one of the Catalina pigs and you don't have a silencer, you let him go. No noise, no alarms, nothing! Understand?"
The bikers murmured their compliance. But one of them, Stonewall, the one in the Confederate cap, raised his parkerized Remington 870. The riot weapon had been modified with a magazine extension and a bayonet mount.
"When we start the round-up," Stonewall asked, "what happens if the locals..."
"If the locals don't follow orders, they die. Once the round-up starts, anything that doesn't move when it's told to, dies. Tell them once, then kill them. But that's only after the special squads are in position. Silence until we turn on the sirens. Then it's straight ahead and we don't stop until the island is ours."
Horse raised his arms to quiet the cheer.
"Remember this," he commanded. "We stay together, everyone does his job, we can't lose. But if anyone pulls some chicken shit trick, anyone gets in a hard place and thinks he can surrender, you think about what I'm going to tell you now.
"We killed four guards to get to the docks. We killed those crazy Jesus-people out in the desert. And we're gonna kill every last hero that tries to stop us on the island. That's murder-by-ambush, that's conspiracy-to-murder, that's murder of witnesses. That's mandatory death sentence, for all of us.
"Some chicken shit thinks he's going to bargain his way out of anything, the most he can hope for is life. Life in a little concrete room. I been inside, I know. So do the chicken shit a favor and kill him. Do us all a favor, kill him. Do we all understand!"
Horse let the bikers cheer and shout. "Outlaws forever!" they yelled. He pushed open the trailer door and jumped down to the barge deck. He stood at the barge's safety ropes for a minute, watching the lights of the Harbor and Long Beach recede.
Then he went into the second trailer. There he answered the questions of twenty more Outlaws, gave them the same speech as the first group. Same seething threats, same encouragement, same venom.
The voices of seventy-two Outlaws had faded, and Horse needed a fix. He wandered the deck of the barge, found shelter from the wind and salt-spray behind the wheels of a semitrailer, and unwrapped his kit. He heard the shuffling of heavy boots above him as he cooked the heroin with the flame of his butane lighter. He pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, tied off, found a vein under all the scars. Horse had been an addict for the past ten years, his habit costing him hundreds of dollars a day. The rush still lifted him to heaven.
His brain floating, Horse watched the wake of the tug and cargo barge chujn the dark ocean. He had been a child and teenager on Catalina. The people had beaten him, jailed him, humiliated him, driven him out of their precious community.
Now he returned.
He returned with a gang of seventy-two felons, psychopaths, addicts.
He came back with a Plan. A lethal plan conceived and drafted by the only man Horse had ever admired: an ally, a friend, and a man of wealth and prestige and position.
He came back with a white-hot hatred for the community that had rejected him. The people of the island would suffer the terror of the Outlaws. The people would die. And their terror and death would make Horse rich beyond his dreams.
2
Fearful of a Japanese invasion of California during World War II, the United States Maritime Service had turned Catalina Island into a fortress and training ground for the armed services.
Closed to the public throughout the war years, only a few civilians had remained on Catalina. Submarines, aircraft carriers and battleships crowded the waters beyond Avalon Bay and Two-Harbors on the island's isthmus. Units from every branch of the armed forces trained on the island. As part of the military presence, the Maritime Service installed a network of loudspeakers and air-raid sirens throughout the city of Avalon.
With the end of the Second World War and the dismantling of the military installations, the network of speakers and sirens remained, intact and periodically tested, as part of the Civil Defense program, in case of another global conflict or the threat of disaster.
Now, suddenly, the sirens ripped the silence of sleeping Avalon.
The people awoke confused. Why would the Civil Defense authorities alert them at two-thirty Sunday morning?
What was it? A tidal wave? Nuclear war? A drowning movie star?
Thoughts both of catastrophe and absurdity raced through the sleepy minds of the islanders as the men, women and children forced themselves to leave homes on the streets and hillsides of Avalon and dutifully brave the chill air. Neighbors gathered in the night in groups, questioning one another. No one had answers.
"Wow, man," Jack Webster smiled, blowing smoke at the ceiling. "It's the end of the world. It's the big Number Three. It's a super-nuke, coming down at ten thousand miles an hour. It's got my name on it!" He took another long drag on the hand-rolled cigarette, exhaling marijuana smoke. "There I go, up in smoke."