L.A. Wars (7 page)

He jerked his knee up, but Hawker caught most of it with his hip.

“You have to learn not to give strangers orders, sonny,” Hawker said. He buried his left fist in the actor's side, then put his weight behind a right that caught Barberino flush on the side of the neck. He spun around like a top, bent at the hips. Hawker timed it just right. His kick caught the actor in the seat of the pants, driving him into the pool.

“He's got a knife, Doug! Look out!”

Hawker was glad, for once, he had met the dizzy Trixie McCall.

Barberino's two friends had been patiently waiting for the actor to polish off Hawker. Now they had decided it was their job.

They looked more like members of a motorcycle gang than actors. Hawker remembered what Melanie had said about her boyfriend's sick friends.

One thing was for sure. These two were playing for keeps.

They each had knives.

Slowly, they came at Hawker. They were stalking him, knives held low, and vectoring.

Hawker backed away, careful not to stumble.

They were trying to trap him against the fence.

From the corner of his eye he noticed Johnny Barberino crawling groggily out of the pool. He also noticed a beer bottle on a stand by the pool.

Hawker grabbed the bottle. He faked once as if to throw, then really did throw it. He had played two seasons of professional baseball in the Tigers' organization, and he could still throw hard enough to make the ball hop between home and second. The bottle jolted the man's head back like a .45 slug.

He fell to the deck, face bloody, unconscious.

The second man lunged at Hawker. The knife blade razored through Hawker's shirt as he jumped back. Hawker caught the man's arm in both hands and drove it down against his knee.

The elbow joint popped like firewood.

A thin scream escaped the man's lips, but Hawker was no longer in a forgiving mood. He wrapped his fist in the matted black hair and clubbed the man's face to pulp with a series of short rights.

“Hawk!
Stop! James, please stop. You'll kill him!”

Melanie St. John was pulling him away. Realizing she was right, Hawker shook his hand free.

The man fell in a heap at his feet.

The fury still cold in his gray eyes, Hawker searched the area until he saw Johnny Barberino. The actor was cowering in a corner by the dressing rooms. The right side of his neck was already purple, and swelling. His carefully combed hair hung in a wet mess over his ears. He looked at Hawker, then looked quickly away.

Hawker pointed at him. “Get the hell out of here, you obnoxious little punk,” he whispered between clenched teeth. Barberino got to his feet, sulking. Hawker stomped his foot. “Now!”

The actor half-walked and half-trotted toward the gate, yelling over his shoulder, “You'll pay for this, motherfucker. You'll be damn sorry you ever touched me!” Barberino was still yelling threats as he disappeared.

Melanie was working on his shirt. “Christ, they tried to stab you. You're bleeding, Hawk.”

By the table Trixie McCall stood, looking at him with concern. Hawker winked and nodded. “Thanks for the help,” he called to her. She still wore only the bikini underwear.

Now that she was standing, Hawker could see that her national admiration was well deserved.

Melanie saw what he was looking at. She took him primly by the arm. “This time I'll play doctor,” she said, leading him away. “And my first orders are: Take your eyes off little Miss Trixie's scenic peaks.”

She pulled herself closer to him, adding in a whisper, “You have other mountains to climb.…”

seven

The next night Hawker continued his assault on the street gangs. He waited until first dusk, then headed for Starnsdale's black slums.

He had one objective: terrorism.

If Virgil Kahl was right, fear and violence were the only two things the Panthers would understand.

Hawker was determined to give them plenty of both. People who are frightened lose their confidence. And they make mistakes.

Hawker also knew that frightened people are dangerous. Damn dangerous.

Like rats trapped in a corner, people who are scared will fight to the death.

Even so, he had to soften up the street gangs. He had to make them vulnerable if the citizens of Hillsboro were to have a fighting chance against them.

They needed all the help they could get.

That afternoon Hawker had had his first training session with the Hillsboro watch group. The men in the group, it seemed, were good men. They had homes and kids and businesses.

They had plenty to fight for. But they were not fighters.

Not yet, anyway. They lacked training and they lacked confidence.

One would follow the other, Hawker hoped. Because to fight effectively, he knew, men had to practice. To be successful, they had to work. And work damn hard.

Courage was just another facet of confidence. And confidence could only be built through hard training.

Hawker told the men this. It seemed to cheer them. Hard work was something they could understand. They had all worked hard in their lives. It made the possibility of success seem within their reach. It took that strange word
fighting
out of the frightening, near-mystic world of machismo.

Hard work was something they could all understand, young and old, fat and thin.

The enthusiasm showed on their faces.

Only Sully McGraw was less than enthusiastic. Hawker was surprised he'd even shown up.

Even so, the huge fat man took orders, followed instructions, and kept his mouth shut.

In the spirit of reconciliation Hawker tried to draw him into conversation during one of their breaks. The file Jacob Hayes had given Hawker included brief biographies on many of the men in the watch group. McGraw, a widower, was the father of three adult daughters. He owned a chain of Los Angeles hock shops, and he was a member of several ultra-right-wing citizens' organizations.

Hawker decided business was a safe conversational topic, and he asked him about his hock shops.

Sully favored him with a long, wilting look and walked away.

“Real talkative guy,” Hawker said to John Cranshaw, who had witnessed the one-sided exchange.

“McGraw can be a little strange,” Cranshaw explained. “But he's one of the most imposing figures in the group. We need him.”

Hawker could only agree.

Hawker began with the basics: safe confrontation of a suspect. Proper backup positioning. Hand signals among team members. Travel overwatch.

It was simple stuff, straight from the SWAT handbook. Hawker drilled it into the men until he was sure they had it—then he drilled it in some more.

He told them they had one simple responsibility during their training:

“You must learn this stuff so well,” he instructed, “that, when you're in a tight spot, you will do everything automatically. You won't have time to think. You won't have time to search your memory. Your life, or the life of a team member, can depend on how automatically you react.”

After two hours of intensive training Hawker turned the group over to Cranshaw for the closing meeting.

He drove back to his bungalow on Manhattan Beach to shower, eat, and maybe even get a little rest before his assault on the Panthers.

He hadn't gotten much sleep at all the previous night. As he drove through the wild Sunday traffic, Hawker couldn't help thinking about Melanie St. John.

After his fight with Johnny Barberino and the two goons, she had walked him back to his cottage. With the efficiency of a trained nurse she had stripped his shirt away and studied the shallow knife scrape across his stomach.

“What's the prognosis, doctor?”

“I think you're very lucky, Hawk.”

“You say that with authority. It's not a line from some role you've played, is it? Florence Nightingale?”

“I play the pretty rural type, with a backbone of steel, remember?”

He touched her chin and kissed her softly. “Typecasting.”

She returned the kiss, holding his head, her lips soft and swollen. Then she pulled away, exhaling loudly. “Hey, don't get me started.”

“Hard for you to stop?”

She eyed him shrewdly. “With you it would be. Besides, I need to get your cut taken care of, then walk back home and say good night to my guests—not to mention the police.”

Hawker put his hands behind his head and said nothing. She scrubbed the cut clean, added disinfectant, and bandaged it.

Noticing the scars on his left shoulder, she hesitated, then said, “It looks like you make a habit of this sort of thing.”

“I'm accident-prone.”

“My, we are evasive, aren't we?” She tore off a strip of surgical tape. “I just realized that you know a good deal about me, but I don't know a single thing about you. Maybe it's the way you listen. You smile at the right places, and nod at the right places, and it gives people the impression you care so much, it's like you're really communicating without talking.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. So talk to me, Hawk. What are you doing in L.A.? What kind of work do you do? Are there a pretty little wife and kids back home? And—”

“And where did I get the scars, right? You're pretty nosy, woman.”

Her voice was formal, but the words weren't. “I like you. You're an interesting and attractive male. I'm an unattached female—not that I'm interested in
being
attached—and you are completely different from the men I've known out here. So I want to hear about you.” She paused for a moment, then gave him a studied gaze. “For some reason I keep thinking you're a cop.”

“I was. In Chicago. I quit less than a year ago.”

“And now?”

“Now I'm looking. I saved some money. My ex-wife runs an art gallery that provides her with a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. She's a very nice and very smart lady who doesn't need my support. We had no kids. I wish we had. So I'm on my own, scars and all.”

“That's a pretty simple story.”

“I'm a pretty simple guy.”

“Are you sure you're not still a cop? Maybe one of the feds, sent out here to Tinseltown to get the real dope—excuse the pun—on us actors?”

“Not me.”

“I'm almost disappointed. I was hoping you would at least be a private eye or something.”

“Sam Spade at your service.”

“I thought your name was Doug.”

“Now even I'm getting confused.”

They both laughed. The laughter lapsed into a comfortable silence. They barely spoke as Melanie finished up. As she opened the door to leave, she stepped and turned. “When I get finished over there, I may be too tired to move. I'll probably just take a shower and crawl in bed.”

“Fine.”

“It was nice meeting you, James.”

“Nice meeting you, Melanie.”

She took a step out the door, then stopped again. She grinned. “You can be a real bastard, you know it? You're not even going to ask me to come back, are you?”

“I guess that ought to be your decision.”

She shrugged and smiled. “I guess you're right,” she said.

Hawker read for two hours, waiting, then drifted off to sleep. He awoke to the click of the door latch.

She was silhouetted against the gray expanse of the window and the sea outside.

Slowly, as if weaving to music, she stepped out of her slacks and unbuttoned her blouse, turning sideways to the window.

Her breasts were swollen cones, the nipples elongated and pointed upward. She rolled her head back, combing her fingers through her flaxen hair, then ran her hands down the sides of her body. In one fluid motion she stripped off her panties.

“That's quite an entrance,” Hawker said softly.

Her laughter was shy. “I didn't know you were awake. You might have said something before I was … naked.”

“Who could sleep with all that beauty going on?”

She moved across the room and knelt beside the bed. “Hey,” she whispered. “I feel like kissing.” She touched her soft lips to his, her tongue tracing the corners of his mouth. She drew away and smiled, then kissed him harder, mouth wide, lips searching.

“How about some light petting?”

“Would Dear Abby approve?”

“Let the old dear find her own man.”

Melanie's hand searched beneath the covers until she found him with her soft fingers, stroking gently.

Hawker lifted her onto the bed beside him. His hand spread wide, he touched the expanse of her firm stomach, pausing on the abrupt flexure of her right breast.

The flesh was firm beneath his hand, the erect nipple like a heated projectile between his thumb and forefinger.

Melanie St. John moaned, her whole body trembling. “Awww … that feels so nice, James …
yes
… do that; keep doing that.…”

Hawker found her breasts with his lips, then followed the curve of her perfect body downward.

“You're my first movie star, lady,” he whispered.

She chuckled. “How do you like it so far?”

“I'm already anxious for the reruns.…”

So Hawker thought about Melanie St. John as he drove.

And he thought about her as he unlocked the door of his cottage and went inside.

And he thought about her as he opened a tin of hash, and cracked eggs to fry for his supper.

You're as bad as a damn moon-eyed teen-ager
, he thought as he ate.

It took a concentrated effort, but he shrugged the fresh memory of the woman away and turned his attention to his plans for the evening.

Jacob Hayes had shipped Hawker's equipment to California in stout wooden crates. After he ate, Hawker finished opening the crates. The weaponry arsenal was impressive. Hawker hoped he wouldn't have to use it all—because, if he did, it would mean war had begun. All-out war.

Carefully he unloaded his electronic gear. He placed the keyboard of his 128K RAM computer on the desk by the telephone in the guest room. He mounted the video screen on top of the keyboard, then patched in the telephone modem.