Bennett 06 - Gone (20 page)

“What’s up?” Ray said, squinting at them.

“Sorry to bother you, sir, but we were wondering if we could start clearing the buffet,” said the one who had knocked on the door.

Ray stared at the guy in pissed-off shock. He’d paid twelve grand to have some privacy for himself and his friends, not to have his chops busted by busboys while Dodger history was being made out there on the diamond.

“No,” Ray said testily. “Come back when—I don’t know, the game’s actually over. Give me a goddamn break.”

That’s when the figure stepped out of the suite’s private bathroom.

“Sorry, Ray,” the man said, “but giving you a break is the one thing we can no longer do.”

Ray, looking at the man’s face, felt suddenly dizzy. Inside, at the center of himself, something slowly began to wobble like a coin spun on a tabletop.

It was Perrine.
Divine Mother of God
, Ray thought. It was Manuel Perrine.

Ray took a step back, raising his balled fists. One of the thugs pulled something out of the Dodger messenger bag he was holding. Ray saw oiled black metal. It was a Heckler and Koch submachine gun.

Manuel Perrine stepped over to him and put an arm over his shoulder.

“I’m sorry to interrupt the festivities, but it’s been a while, my friend.” Manuel grinned widely. There was a dreamy quality to his smile, a dreamy quality to everything.

“What the fuck is this?” Ray whispered.

“Come with us, Ray,” Perrine said, lifting a hot wing from the buffet beside them. He sniffed it and tossed it back on the pile. “And we’ll talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax. Of cabbages and kings. Or we can take care of matters here, if you wish to involve your friends.”

Ray swallowed.

“No, no, Manuel. I’ll go with you. Whatever you want. Just let me say good-bye.”

“Yes, of course,” Manuel said. “But no monkey business now.”

Ray went back out onto the patio. He stared at the flashing scoreboard. The crowd. His wife.

“What is it?” Denise said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Something about my credit card. I’ll be back in a second. I love you, OK?”

He kissed her hard, his lips burning, his fingers tracing her belly, and then somehow peeled himself away.

THEY LED HIM OUT
and into another suite down the hallway, which had its privacy blinds pulled down. Inside the door, one of the thugs slammed his head off the concrete wall hard enough to split the skin and began frisking him.

“Nothing,” the thug said.

“That’s quite unfortunate for you to go about unarmed, Raymond,” Perrine said, sitting and swiveling around in a Dodger lounge chair. “Considering how vulnerable a man you are.”

Ray stood there, blinking. He had met Perrine a few years back at one of his clubs. They quickly went into business and had become fast friends. He’d actually visited Perrine’s villa in Mexico. Manuel had been like a mentor to him, taught him how to move drugs, how to keep an eye on the cops.

“I’m out of it, Manny,” Ray said. “I don’t know what you heard, but I’m out of it. The whole thing. I gave it to Roger.”

“That’s precisely the problem,” Perrine said. “Roger is a DEA informant. What am I saying? That’s wrong. What I meant to say is, Roger
was
a DEA informant. Your recommendation of Roger lost me at least fifteen million, Raymond. In fact, during the seizure, my brother-in-law was popped. To add insult to injury, my brother-in-law was then killed about six months into his sentence by one of my rivals. My sister, still to this day, continues to make my life unpleasant.

“Do you see my dilemma? You screwed me, Raymond, and the sad fact of the matter is that I have to unscrew myself. And, as you well know, there is only one way to do that.”

“But I’m out of it.”

Perrine peered at him.

“Look around you, Raymond. You are very much in it. Such a shame. You were so good at it, too. The looks, the street smarts, the LA charm, truly a natural. Believe it or not, I had big plans for you. But that was then. Any last words?”

Ray’s face slackened with an almost catatonic bewilderment. He was going to die now?! Just like that!?

“I, uh. I, uh,” he said.

“Hmmm. Strange choice. I, uh, what? I, uh, therefore I am?” Manuel asked.

The thugs began giggling. A heavy blow to his kidney knocked him to his knees. There was a shriek, and then duct tape was smeared hard over his mouth and ears.

Ray stared down at the carpet, half unconscious with terror. He was unresisting as his shoes, socks, shirt, shorts, and finally his underwear were stripped from his body.

He had been adopted. That was why he’d been so excited about becoming a father. A lot of adopted people acted all forgiving about their biological parents, talked about how brave they were for abandoning their own flesh and blood, but not him. Once his kid was born, he’d been planning to show them. He was going to attach his kid to himself, hold the tiny, brand-new human in his arms and never ever let him go.

Only now he never would.

A hand grabbed his hair, pulled him up on his knees, yanked his head back, exposing his throat. Ray pinched his crying eyes shut as bright white camera light torched his face.

“This is what happens to those who stand in the way of Los Salvajes!” Manuel screamed as Ray felt something hard and cold bite under his right ear.

PARKER AND I DECIDED
to meet up for a late-night dinner when news of the Dodger Stadium murder dropped.

A little after one in the morning, we left the hotel and drove to a softly lit restaurant called Ammo, on Highland Avenue in Hollywood.

“I like the name,” I said to Parker as we sat at a booth. “After what happened at the ball game tonight, we’re probably going to need a case of double-aught buck and couple of boxes of fifty caliber to go.”

Instead, we ordered some drinks. Jack and ginger ale for me, a pinot grigio for Emily. I’d actually had a couple of room service beers after I heard about the ball-game decapitation, but they hadn’t worked at all. After seeing the now-national news coverage about the savagery committed in the midst of the Dodger home opener, I’d never felt more sober in my life.

On the ride over, Emily had told me that a team from our Perrine task force had been sent to the stadium, but we hadn’t heard back from them yet.

“It’s Perrine. We both know it,” Parker said angrily as she placed her unringing phone down on the corner of the table. “He’s marking his new US territory now and rubbing our noses in it in the process.”

Emily sighed as she stared out the plate-glass window. She looked tired. Pale and drained, as if she’d just given blood. The hours she was putting in would have taxed anyone, not to mention the unrelenting pressure from above. And still we couldn’t move the needle on what the cartels were doing. I shared her frustration. No doubt about it, we were getting our asses thoroughly kicked.

“I saw this video on the Internet recently,” Emily said, “where these kids, these nice, normal-looking suburban kids, film themselves slowly, methodically, and mercilessly abusing a sixty-eight-year-old bus monitor. They call her fat, ugly, say that she should hang herself. And as she sits there, crying, these kids are laughing themselves silly. I mean, her tears are turning these kids on. It’s like debasing this poor old woman is the greatest and funniest thing they’ve ever done in their life.”

“I saw it, too,” I said. “I wish I hadn’t. It was like something out of
A Clockwork Orange
, only for real.”

She lifted her wine and stared at it.

“You ever wonder if maybe Perrine is a symptom of a larger disease? As if things are … changing. As if people are changing. Their attitudes. The way we treat each other. Look at all this bath-salt stuff. People biting each other’s faces off. The flash mobs where hundreds of punks go wilding in some store.

“Seems to me, the center is having some serious trouble holding these days, Mike. It’s like Perrine is picking up on that and just going to town, trying to egg on complete collapse. Maybe it’s time to head for the hills. Any room up in Northern Cali for one more in the Bennett militia?”

“Nah,” I said, marking circles on the napkin with the bottom of my drink. “That’s not the move, Emily. Trust me. The hills are a nice place to visit, but you don’t want to live there. I know things are looking pretty bleak, but right here, right now, is the place to be. This latest crap from Perrine only proves it. He’s trying to break our will, but he’s out of his league. Bigger assholes than he have tried and failed. I told him before, when he was in custody, he has no idea who the hell he’s messing with.”

“How can you be so sure?”

I rattled the cubes in my glass.

“Think about Nine-Eleven, Emily. Three hundred Spartans stood up against a million invaders at Thermopylae, right? Well, down in the valley of Lower Manhattan on Nine-Eleven, four hundred and three fire-fighters, cops, paramedics, and service members stared up into the face of six hundred million cubic pounds of unmoored steel and glass and concrete that hovered, burning and groaning and swaying, above them. Six hundred million cubic pounds!

“And they didn’t blink! They held the line, held their post. With burning debris and the bodies of the victims exploding around them, they stood there and stood there and stood there, saving life after life, pulling out person after person from the burning, bloody, hungry jaws of what can only be properly described as hell on earth. The victims in the towers and the Pentagon and on the planes didn’t have a choice about being vaporized.

“Those four hundred and three on the ground had a choice, and they chose that others could live.”

After a long moment, Emily nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “King Leonidas would have tipped his horsehair helmet.”

“Of course, I’m right. That’s our legacy, Emily. The terrorists think they won that day? Keep dreaming. The terrorists only proved what they feared the most about Americans. That among us live everyday superheroes, free men and women who at the drop of a hat, or in this case a skyline, will stand up and sacrifice their lives to save someone else. Who the hell on this earth is still ballsy and crazy enough to go down with the ship? Us! That’s who!”

I clinked my glass to Emily’s.

“Chin up, Agent Parker. Perrine thinks he’s crazy? We’ll show his ass the meaning of crazy before this thing is through.”

THE WAITRESS HAD JUST
brought dessert when our phones went crazy. On the tabletop beside my untouched cheesecake, my iPhone started its almost subliminal hum a split second before Parker’s mobile joined in.

“Oh, wait. Are you following Bieber on Twitter, too?” I joked as we both looked at the incoming texts.

“The task force is calling a meeting now? It’s coming on two a.m.,” Parker said, shaking her head at her BlackBerry.

“No rest for the semiconscious,” I said, fishing out my wallet.

About half the task force was present and accounted for when Emily and I arrived upstairs at Olympic Station twenty minutes later. Instead of sitting at their workstations, the cops and agents were gathered together, standing in the very middle of the command center, in front of an overhead projector screen.

It was eerily quiet in the crowded room. Under the garish fluorescent lighting, pretty much everyone looked physically and mentally exhausted, not to mention frantic. Of course they were. The killing at Dodger Stadium was obviously an act of terrorism. Who knew what would happen next?

The lights dimmed after a moment, and the swirling circle of a loading digital video appeared on the white, sail-like screen.

“What’s this?” I whispered as we stepped over beside Agent Rothkopf.

Rothkopf shook his head grimly.

“LAPD Detective Division just received an e-mail with an attached video. They think it’s from Perrine.”

The screen focused, and then Perrine was there. Sitting in a Dodger-blue leather chair, he was wearing disposable white Tyvek coveralls. From chest to knees, the coveralls were splattered in blood.

He must have been in one of the stadium’s luxury suites. There were video game consoles behind him, video monitors, bar stools. Behind him on the wall were the framed Dodger jerseys of Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, Tommy Lasorda.

The camera zoomed back a little, and beyond the window of the suite, the packed stands could be seen. There was a sudden loud, swelling, sizzling sound as fans stood in succession, doing the wave. Perrine waited and then did it as well, rising out of his club chair with his hands raised before swiveling back for the camera.

“Hey, LAPD, FBI, and all my other fans out there tonight in La-La Land. How are you doing this fine evening? As you can see, I myself am having a blast here in your city.”

Perrine smiled as he did a little drumroll on the arm of the chair. He seemed pumped, really enjoying himself.

From off screen, someone suddenly offered him something. It was a hot pretzel with mustard on it. He looked it over and then carefully took it by the napkin before he took a bite.

“I wanted to take this opportunity,” Perrine said, chewing, “to communicate with this task force that has been set up to find me. Ask yourselves honestly, are you truly up for the job? You people have families, people who depend on you. How will you be able to look out for them? What if you come home from work tonight and they have some—what is the term—
assembly
required?”

He took another bite, thumbing mustard off the corner of his mouth.

“I always give people a chance to get out of my way,” he said after licking his thumb. “That is why I am strongly advising you to relieve yourselves of your present duty. You should take this opportunity to transfer, retire, or, better yet, quit. In fact, if I were you, I would leave Southern California with your families as soon as possible.”

The two dozen of us standing there looked from the screen to each other with the same question etched in every face.
Say what?