1990 - Mine v4 (28 page)

"It's no problem!" Janette, tiny and feisty as a firecracker, was on her feet, too. "We screwed up, okay? We were talking and we screwed up. It was just a little dent, that's all."

"Yeah," Edward agreed. "Busted our taillight but didn't do shit to the pigs. They weren't supposed to be parked right on our ass."

"Edward?" It was CinCin's cool Oriental voice, her face like a carved yellow cameo framed with raven hair. "Did they ask to see your driver's license?"

"Yeah." A quick glance at Lord Jack. Mary sat in a rocking chair in the corner, her hands folded over the swelling of Jack's child in her belly. "But it was no sweat," Edward went on. The license was forged, as were all their licenses. Edward flipped his long brown ponytail back. "The pig even laughed about it, said he'd busted up his own car last week and his old lady was still giving him hell about it."

"Did the pigs follow you?" Akitta Washington asked. He was a barrel-chested black man who wore African beads and amulets around his neck, and he went to a window and peered out at the street.

"No. Hell, no. Why would they follow us?" There was a quaver in Edward's voice.

"Because," Mary said from her rocking chair, "some pigs have the sixth sense." She had golden blond hair that hung around her shoulders, her face high-cheekboned and serene: the face of an outlaw Madonna. "Some pigs can smell fear." She cocked her head to one side, her eyes cool and intense. "Do you think those pigs smelled any fear on you, Edward?"

"Get off his case!" Janette shouted. "The pigs didn't roust us, okay? They just ID'd Edward and let us go, that's it!"

Lord Jack began to pace the room: a bad sign. "Maybe it
is
okay," Didi Morse said, sitting on the floor cleaning a revolver with the same fingers that could shape raw clay into objects of earthen art. She was a lovely young woman with green eyes and braided hair as red as a battle flag, her bone structure Iowa solid. "Maybe it's no big deal."

Sancho grunted, smoking a joint. Gary Leister was already attacking one of the pizzas, and James Xavier Toombs sat with his pipe clenched between his teeth and a book of haiku in his lap, his face as emotionless as a black Buddha.

"I don't like it," Jack said. He went to the window, looked out, and paced again. "I don't like it." He continued to pace the room as some of the others began to feast on the pizzas. "Snowden?" he said at last. "Go upstairs and watch from the bedroom window."

"Why do I have to go? I always get the shit detail!"

"GO!" Jack roared. "And Edward, you get your ass upstairs and watch from the arsenal." It was the room where all their weapons and ammunition were hidden in the walls. "Move it, I said! Today, not next fucking week!"

They went. Jack's piercing blue gaze found CinCin. "Walk up to Carazella's and buy a paper," he told her. She left a slice of pizza half eaten and went without question, knowing he was telling her to go out and sniff the air for the stench of pigs. Then Jack walked over to Mary, and he placed his hand against her belly. She grasped his fingers and looked up into his fiery beauty, his long blond hair hanging around his shoulders and a hawk's feather dangling from a ring in his right earlobe. Mary started to say
I love you
, but she checked it. Lord Jack didn't believe in the word; what passed as love, he said, was a tool of the Mindfuck State. He believed in courage, truth, and loyalty, of brothers and sisters willing to lay down their lives for each other and the cause. One-to-one "love," he believed, came from the false world of button-down stiffs and their robotic, manicured prostitutes.

But she couldn't help it. She loved him, though she dared not say it. His wrath could strike like lightning and leave ashes in its wake.

Jack rubbed her belly, and he looked at Akitta. "Watch the backyard." Akitta nodded and went to do it. "Gary! You walk to the Laundromat and back. Take a couple of dollars and get some change in the machine." The Laundromat was two blocks away, in the opposite direction of Carazella's. Mary knew Jack was setting up a defensive perimeter. Gary walked out into the still, humid evening, and the smell of somebody's burgers on a grill drifted into the house. A dog barked in the distance, two more answering across the neighborhood.

Jack stood at the front window, working his knuckles. He said, "I don't hear Frodo."

James Xavier Toombs looked up from his haiku, his pipe in his mouth, and a small puff of blue smoke left his lips.

"Frodo." Jack's voice was low and hushed. "How come Frodo's not barking?"

Frodo was a stumpy little white mutt, the pet of the Giangello family two doors down the street. The Giangellos called him Caesar, but Jack had named him Frodo because of the dog's massive hairy paws. Frodo's bark was distinctive, a deep, throaty woof that started up with the regularity of a machine whenever any other dogs barked in the neighborhood. Jack looked at the other Storm Fronters. His tongue flicked out, lizardlike, to skim his lower lip. "Frodo's quiet," he said. "How come?"

No one spoke. There was electricity in the room, the pizzas forgotten. Mary had stopped rocking, her hands gripped on the armrests. James Xavier Toombs returned the book of haiku to the well-stocked bookshelf. He removed a thick red volume titled
Democracy in Crisis
. He opened it and took his.45 automatic from the hollowed-out book. There was a crisp
click
as he checked the ammo clip. James Xavier Toombs, a man of few words, said, "Trouble."

Mary stood up, and the baby moved inside her as if it, too, were readying for action. "I'll go upstairs and keep watch," she said as she picked up a couple of slices of pizza and walked toward the stairs. Bedelia Morse took her revolver and went to the back to watch the northeastern corner of the house, Sancho took the southwestern corner, and Toombs and Lord Jack stayed in the front room. Mary checked on Edward and Janette; neither one had seen anything remotely suspicious. Then Mary settled herself in the small bedroom overlooking the street, and she sat in a chair near the window with the lights off. The lights were also off in the house directly across Elderman, but that was nothing unusual. The old couple who lived there, the Steinfelds, were in bed by seven o'clock, and it was after eight. Mr. Steinfeld had emphysema, and his wife suffered from a bad bladder and had to wear adult-sized diapers. Changing diapers was a task that would be in Mary's future. She figured it wouldn't be so bad once she got used to it. Besides, it would be Jack's child, and so perfect he'd probably pop out toilet trained. Right, she thought as she smiled faintly in the dark. Dream on.

CinCin returned with her newspaper. No pigs, she told Jack. Everything was quiet.

"Did you see anybody on the street?" he asked her, and when she said no he told her to go upstairs to the armory and get Edward and Janette to help her start loading up the guns and ammo. As a precaution, they were going to leave the house and go upstate for a few days.

Gary came back, a pocketful of change in his purple tie-dyed jeans. No problems, he said.

"Nothing different?" Jack prodded. "Nothing at all?"

Gary shrugged. "Panhandler was parked on the ground in front of the Laundromat, and he asked me for a hit on the way in. I gave him a quarter coming out."

"Had you ever seen the dude before?"

"Nope. It's no big deal, man. He was just a panhandler."

"You know the old lady who runs that place," Jack reminded him. "You ever remember that stiff old bitch letting a panhandler set up shop in her front door?"

Gary thought about it. "No," he said. "I don't."

At nine forty-two, CinCin reported an unmarked, beat-up panel truck cruising slowly through the back alley. About half an hour later, Akitta thought he heard the metallic noise of a voice on a radio, but he wasn't sure where it was coming from. Toward eleven, Mary was still sitting in her chair in the dark when she thought she saw a movement in one of the black upstairs windows of the Steinfeld house. She leaned forward, her heart beating harder. Did something move over there, or not? She waited, watching, as the seconds ticked into minutes.

She saw it.

A tiny red circle, flaring in the dark and then ebbing again.

A cigarette, she thought. Somebody was smoking a cigarette.

In a house where an old man had emphysema, somebody was smoking.

Mary stood up. "Jack?" she called. Her voice trembled, and the sound shamed her. "
Jack?
"

A floodlight hit the house with such suddenness that it stole Mary's breath. She could feel its heat on her, and she dodged away from the window. A second floodlight came on, and a third, the first aimed from the Steinfeld house and the others from houses on either side of number 1105. "Shit!" she heard Edward cry out. There was the noise of somebody racing up the stairs, and other bodies flinging themselves to the floor. A few seconds later the lights in the house went out: one of the Storm Fronters had hit the fusebox.

The sound that Mary had dreaded for years finally came: the amplified voice of a pig through an electric bullhorn. "Attention, occupants of 1105 Elderman! This is the FBI! Come out into the light with your hands behind your heads! I repeat, come out into the light! If you follow my directions, nobody'll get hurt!"

Jack burst into the room, carrying a flashlight and an Uzi submachine gun. "Fuckers have ringed us! Must've cleared the fucking houses and we didn't even know it! Come on, load up!"

In the armory, guns were loaded and passed around by flashlight. Mary took an automatic and returned to the bedroom window. Janette joined her, carrying a shotgun and with three hand grenades clipped to her belt. The bullhorn squawked again: "We don't want bloodshed! Jack Gardiner, do you hear me?" The downstairs telephone began to ring; it ended when Jack ripped it off its wire. "Jack Gardiner! Give yourself and the others up! There's no point in getting anyone hurt!"

How they'd been nailed, Mary didn't know. She would find out, months later, that the pigs had evacuated the surrounding structures and been watching the house for five hours. The incident with the pig car had happened because the overeager Linden cop who'd been trailing Edward and Janette had wanted to see a Storm Fronter at close range. AH Mary knew, as the floodlights blazed and her brothers and sisters crouched down and took aim, was that the eve of destruction had finally arrived.

James Xavier Toombs shot out the first floodlight. Gary hit the second, but before the third could be shot out the pigs switched on their auxiliary lights and opened fire on the green house.

Bullets tore through the walls, ricocheting off pipes and whining over their heads. "No surrender!" Lord Jack roared over the noise. "No surrender!" Akitta repeated. "No surrender!" CinCin Omara echoed. "No surrender!" Mary heard herself shout, and Janette's voice was lost in the hell of Storm Front guns bellowing their death cries. The pigs were firing, too, and in a matter of seconds every window in the green house was shattered, the air a razormist of flying glass. Janette's shotgun boomed, and Mary fired shot after shot at the window where she'd seen the glow of a pig's cigarette. In the scant lull between fusillades, Mary heard the crackle of radios and the shouts of pigs. Downstairs, someone was screaming: Gary Leister, shot through the chest and writhing in a pool of blood. Janette was pumping shells into the shotgun and blasting as fast as she could, the spent cartridges flying into the air. She stopped to pull a grenade from her belt, and she yanked its pin and stood up to toss it at the house across the street. The grenade bounced up under a car parked at the curb, and in the next second the vehicle was lifted up on a gout of fire and crashed over on its side, burning gasoline streaking across the pavement. By the flickering light, the pigshadows darted and ran. Mary shot at one of them, saw him stagger and fall onto the Steinfelds' front porch.

The next blast of pig bullets shook the green house on its foundations, blew a hole the size of a fist in the back of Sancho Clemenza's skull, and ripped away two of James Xavier Toombs's fingers. Mary heard Lord Jack shouting: "No surrender! No surrender!" One of the Storm Fronters threw a stick of dynamite with a sparking fuse, and the house next door exploded in a geyser of fire, wood, and glass. A vehicle of some kind was coming along the street: an armored car, Mary saw with a jolt of horror. The snout of a machine gun spat tracer bullets, and the slugs tore through the punctured walls like meteors. Two of those bullets hit Akitta Washington in the remains of the kitchen, and sprayed his blood across the refrigerator. Another stick of dynamite was thrown, destroying the Steinfeld house in a thunderclap. Flames leapt high, waves of black smoke rolling across the neighborhood. The armored car stopped, hunched on the street like a black beetle, fiery tracers spitting from its machine gun. Mary heard Janette sob, "The bastards! The bastards!" and Janette rose up in the flickering red light and yanked the pin from a second grenade. She threw her arm back to toss the grenade through the window, tears running down her face, and suddenly the room was full of flying wood splinters and ricocheting tracers and Janette Snowden was knocked backward. The grenade fell from her fingers, and Mary watched as if locked in a fever dream as the live grenade rolled across the blood-spattered floorboards.

Mary had a second or two in which her brain was seized up. Reach for the grenade, or get the fuck out? Janette's body was jittering on the floor. The grenade was still rolling.

Out
.

The thought screamed. Mary stood up, crouched low, and ran for the door with cold sweat bursting from the pores of her flesh.

She heard the grenade thunk against the baseboard. In that instant she lifted her hands to shield her face, and she realized she should have shielded her unborn baby instead.

Surprisingly, she did not hear the grenade explode. She was aware only of a great heat lapping against her midsection, like the sun on a particularly fierce day. There was a feeling of lightness, of stepping outside her body and soaring upward. And then the sensation of gravity caught her again and wrenched her back to earth, and she opened her eyes in the upstairs hallway of the burning house, a hole in the bedroom's flaming wall and much of the ceiling collapsed and on fire. Somebody was trying to help her up. She saw a gaunt, bearded face and a ponytail. Edward. "… Up, get up!" he was saying, blood streaking his forehead and cheeks like war paint. She could barely hear him for the buzz in her ears. "Can you get up?"