Point of Impact

34

When Tad woke up, he noticed a couple things: First, he was on the deck, with the beach umbrella doing its best to keep him in the shade, but starting to lose that battle.

Second, there were some men with guns wandering around in the house.

Fortunately, he recognized one of the gunslingers, so he realized the bodyguards had showed up, and Bobby must have decided to hire them.

Shit happened when you went into hibernation. You got used to it.

He looked at his watch, and the date showed he’d been out for a couple of days. Not too bad.

His head felt as if somebody had opened it with a dull shovel and poured half the beach into it. He was way beyond grainy. All the rest of him just hurt. Bad.

He managed to get to his feet, using the umbrella for support, and headed toward the bathroom. Once, after sleeping for a couple of days, he had stood over the toilet peeing for more than a minute, on and on, must have pissed half a gallon. For some reason, his bladder never let go while he was out, and he counted that as a blessing.

The guy with the gun that Tad recognized nodded at him. “Hey, Tad.”

Tad nodded in return. The name came to him, slow, but there. “Adam. How’s it going?”

“Good. Bobby’s out. He’s supposed to be back in a while.”

“Cool.”

He shambled into the bathroom, cranked the shower up, then stripped. He waited a few seconds for the water to heat up, then stepped into the shower. He stank, and he could pee just as well in the shower.

He needed to get to his stash. He wasn’t gonna be able to function real well for a couple of days yet, no matter what, but certainly not straight.

He opened his mouth, let the needle spray rinse the taste of tar and mold out, spat three or four times, then swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of the hot water. He knew he was dehydrated, and if that got bad enough, his electrolytes could get wacky enough to stop his heart. He’d known guys on speed who hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a couple of days who’d died that way. Heart just stopped beating.

He stayed in the shower for ten minutes, letting the spray pound him. He felt a little better when he stepped out onto the cool tile floor and started drying himself with the big fluffy beach towel. A little better wasn’t going to cut it.

His stash was in the wheel well of his car’s trunk, and the car was parked in the lot of the sandwich place two down from them. When Bobby was running in paranoid mode, which was most of the time, he wouldn’t let Tad keep anything in the house that might get them busted. Not even in the car, if Tad wanted to park it in the driveway or garage or anywhere inside the security gate. Nothing more than you can swallow, Bobby told him, and close enough so you can do that if somebody crashes the gate.

Tad mostly tried to do it that way. For a while, he buried his drugs on the beach. He had kept his stuff in a mason jar with a plastic lid so no coin-hunter or narc would find it with a metal detector. He would sneak out late at night and bury the jar in the sand. But he’d lost one that way, completely spaced out on where he’d hidden it. And another time, somebody’s dog had dug up one of the jars, so he’d stopped that. The walk to the car wasn’t that far, half a block, but of course, it felt like a thousand miles after a session with the Hammer.

Well, there was no help for it. He wasn’t going to send Adam or one of his hard-ass friends to collect his dope. He didn’t trust anybody that much except Bobby, and Bobby wouldn’t do it anyway.

Tad slipped on a pair of raggy black sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and a pair of black zorrie sandals. Might as well get to it. It was gonna take a while.

“I’m walking over to where I parked my car,” he told Adam. “Don’t fucking shoot me when I come back.”

“Why waste a bullet?” Adam said. “You look like somebody could kill you with a hard look. Hell, you look dead already.”

“You need to work on your material, Adam. I heard that one already.”

“Lots of times, I bet.”

Tad thought about his route for a minute. Out the front gate and along the road was longer. But walking along the beach through the sand would be harder. The road would be noisier, all the traffic. The beach would be hot. He’d have to walk around cars parked on the highway. He didn’t need any more obstacles at the moment. Until he got his medicine mixed and working, just breathing was an effort.

Okay, the beach. He headed for the deck stairs.

Michaels said, “One of those three or four houses?”

Howard drove, Michaels rode shotgun, Jay sat in the back. As they idled slowly along the highway, looking toward the beach, Jay said, “Got to be. Permit specifies this part of the beach. That sandwich shop over there is in the movie. I pulled it up and scanned location shots. That house to the far left was built two years ago, so it wasn’t there then.”

“Do we have owners on these?”

“Yes. The pinkish one is owned by the actress Lorrie DeVivio. She got it in the divorce settlement with her fifth ex-husband Jessel Tammens, the movie producer.”

“DeVivio is what… sixty and rich? Hard to image her making and peddling dope,” Howard said.

“Ah, you know the old movie stars, eh, General?”

“She won an Oscar,” Howard said. “And not for her looks.”

“What about the other houses?”

“Second one belongs to the chairman of the board of the Yokohama-USA Bank. He’s also sixty-something and also richer than God.

“Third one, the pale blue and white one, is owned by a corporation called Projects, Inc. Some kind of corporate retreat, maybe. I’m running down the incorporation stuff now. They are out of Delaware.

“Fourth one belongs to one Saul Horowitz. Don’t know who Solly is, and the searchbots haven’t been more forthcoming so far.”

“That sounds promising. Pull over there, into that restaurant lot, and let’s think about this for a minute,” Michaels said.

All four of the houses had security gates and fences, at least to the road side. As Howard parked the car, a Mercedes convertible arrived in front of the third house and pulled up to the gate. The car’s top was down, and a sun-bleached blond, deeply tanned young man in a Hawaiian shirt who looked like a surfer held up an electronic remote and pointed it at the heavy steel gate, which slowly swung open to admit his car. He pulled into the drive, and the gate started to close behind him.

“Yo, kahuna dude!” Jay said, in a valley-boy voice, “Surf’s up!” Jay held up his hand, the middle fingers closed, his thumb and little finger extended. He waggled his hand back and forth. “Mahalo!”

“Thank you, Brian Wilson. You get the license plate number?” Michaels said.

“Crap! I’m sorry, boss—”

“It’s a vanity,” Howard said. “P-R-O-J-E-C-T-S.”

“Run it,” Michaels ordered.

Jay, chagrined at his failure to catch the number, dialed up the California DMV and logged in, using his Net Force access code.

A few seconds later, he said, “Car is owned by Projects, Inc.,” he said. “Big surprise there, huh? Looks like you get wheels to go with the house. Nice perks.”

“So, what do you think?” Michaels said.

“Either it’s that one or the Horowitz place,” Howard said. “Rich bankers and rich movie stars might use dope, but they don’t need to sell it.”

“Just FYI, General, they found a bug on your car. That’s how the shooter kept from losing you.” Jay pointed at the flatscreen. “Also, Mr. Lee, who as we all know couldn’t have been said shooter, called in sick today.”

“Something fatal, I hope,” Howard said.

“And to keep things interesting, Mr. Zachary George is on vacation this week and next,” Jay said.

Michaels said, “Anything on the searchbots for Mr. Horowitz here yet?”

“Nope,” Jay said. “But I don’t think we need it.”

“And why would that be?”

“Take a look at the death-warmed-over stick in black walking along the road there, coming from the sandwich place,” Jay said.

“So?”

“Look again, boss.”

Michaels did. He frowned.

“Yeah,” Jay said. “Kind of hard to picture him beating the crap out of a room full of bodybuilders and trashing a gym, isn’t it?”

Michaels nodded. “But that’s the guy.”

“Never thought I’d see an actual match to a police ID composite,” Jay said. “All we have to do is watch and see if he chooses door A or door B. Whichever one he picks, I’d bet my next month’s salary against a bent quarter that’s our dealer’s house.”

The three watched the man, who looked as if he might fall down any second, as he shambled along. It took him a while to get there, but he finally did.

“And we have a winner,” Jay said. “It’s the surfer dude’s pad. Net Force rules!” He looked at Michaels. “Now what, boss? We gonna go kick ass and take names?” He held up his air taser and waggled it.

Both Howard and Michaels laughed.

Michaels said, “I see your experience in the field didn’t teach you anything. We’re not going anywhere. We’re calling the FBI. They’ll go in.”

Drayne parked the car and went in. He saw one of the bodyguards skulking behind the banana and short palm trees nod and wave at him. Good to know they were watching the place like they should.

Inside, Drayne walked out to the deck. Adam was there, looking at the ocean. “Where’s Tad?”

“He stepped out, said he was going to his car,” Adam said. “Said he’d be back in a few minutes.”

Drayne nodded. Tad would be self-medicating as soon as he was ambulatory again, and his pharmacy would be in his car, parked away from the house. It better be.

The front door opened, and speak of the devil.

“Hey, Bobby.”

“Tad. You all right?”

“Will be in about half an hour.” He headed for the kitchen.

Drayne followed Tad into the kitchen, watched as Tad counted out ten or twelve pills, caps, caplets, and tablets, filled a glass with water from the tap filter line, and washed the drugs down in one big swallow.

“While you were napping, I set up some things,” Bobby said. “I was gonna send one of the bodyguards, but now that you’re awake, you can make the FedEx run.”

“Okay.”

“We’re moving forty-five hits of the Hammer.”

Tad raised an eyebrow.

“Might as well make hay while the sun shines,” Drayne said.

“You mixed it already?”

“Yep. Did the final at the new house, so the stuff is just under an hour old.”

“Got mine?”

“It’s too soon, Tad, you ought to sit this batch out. I’ll be doing another bunch next week.”

Tad didn’t say anything, and Drayne shook his head. “It’s your ass.”

“Such that it is, yeah,” Tad said. “Give me thirty minutes for the stack to kick in, I’ll be ready to roll.”

Drayne shook his head again. “Your funeral.”

“Geez, Boss, you don’t think the three of us could take one surfer dude and a zombie?”

Michaels had already put in the call to the director, and she in turn had called the local FBI shop and started the ball rolling. He said, “Isn’t this the zombie who wiped up the floor with a gym full of guys strong enough to pick up tractor trailers? Didn’t you just bring that up?”

“Yeah, but—”

“And don’t you recall the recordings of a white-haired old man who shrugged off a cloud of pepper gas and air tasers like they were mosquitoes and tossed guards and cops around a casino like a kid throwing toy soldiers? Or a woman who ripped an ATM machine out of a wall with her bare hands?”

“Yeah, but he can barely move now. He can’t be on the drug.”

Howard said, “There are too many things we don’t know here, Jay. Think about it. What is the lay of the house? Can they sneak out the back while we’re climbing the front gate? Are they armed? Who else is in there with them? I’m the only one with a gun here, so do you and the commander run around back and make sure they don’t escape with your tasers while I try to kick in what might be an armored front door? Not to disparage your shooting ability, but even if you hit something, you’ve only got one shot before you have to reload, and the fastest AT reload I’ve ever seen took almost two seconds. I’d guess you couldn’t do it in five or six. In two seconds, a man can run twenty, twenty-five feet, knock you down, and take off. In six seconds, he could be down the road having a beer, figuratively speaking. And that’s unarmed. If the surfer or the zombie have weapons, what do you think they’ll be doing with them if you miss? Or if you yell ‘Stop!’ and they shoot first? They could have a submachine gun in there, and they could take out twenty civilians out there on the beach. That would be after they cut you down.”

“Mm,” Jay said. “That would be bad for public relations, not to mention my personal love life. So why didn’t we call in Net Force troops? We can trust them.”

“That would have been my choice,” Howard said, “but the commander is right. We found them, but it isn’t our operation, we aren’t supposed to even be here, we’re outside our job description. If we had a dozen Net Force military troops kick in the door of a Malibu beach house, we’d all be looking for jobs. Assuming we could even get our people here in the next couple of hours, which we could not.”

Michaels said, “By rights, this belongs to the DEA. Even if the director decides to let FBI agents make the arrests, it’s still a hot political potato. The director can risk pissing off a brother agency, we can’t. We can’t even get warrants, so even if we were willing to get fired, the capture wouldn’t be legal. Even an ambulance-chaser lawyer with a lobotomy could get them off. The arrests would be completely illegal.”

“Yeah, okay, I can see all that,” Jay said. His voice was reluctant.

Michaels looked at his watch. “We should have agents showing up within thirty or forty minutes, if we’re lucky. We do it by the numbers, get part of the credit, and most importantly, the drug dealer is off the street. The end result is the same, no matter who hauls them off.”

“For how long is he off the street?” Jay asked.

“Excuse me?’

“This guy is carrying around a secret that is worth millions, maybe tens of millions, you said so yourself. Won’t the drug companies be falling all over themselves to be first in line to hire him the best legal team in the world? How high can his bail be?”

Michaels nodded. He knew what Jay said was true. “Probably. But that’s not our worry. We were supposed to find him. We found him. We did our part. What happens to him after they catch him isn’t our problem, we don’t have any control over that. We’re just a cog in the big machine, Jay. We do our job, we have to hope the rest of the system does its job. Can’t be everywhere.”

“That sucks,” Jay said.

“Welcome to the real world, son,” Howard said.