Revolution No.9

35

Monks’s home telephone rang five times. He let the answering machine take the call.

“Carroll?” Sara’s voice said, with brittle sweetness. “Will you pick up the phone, please? I know you’re there.”

He raised his glass blearily and swallowed more vodka. It was sometime after dark; he didn’t know or care when. He was sprawled on the couch in his living room, surrounded by squalor-clothes on the floor, unwashed dishes, half-eaten food. Like a man evading creditors, he hadn’t answered the phone for the past two days. The only reason that he left the phone on at all was because the severed ear was being DNA tested and he still harbored a whisper of hope that it wasn’t Glenn’s.

“We have to talk,” Sara said imploringly. “You can’t just keep your head buried in the sand. I understand why you had to lie to me, and I’m over it now.”

His cats prowled the mess happily, one or another of them occasionally settling on his chest to comfort him. A dying fire in the woodstove kept the chill away. The television was playing an old episode of Have Gun, Will Travel. Richard Boone had just finished thumping a couple of mouthy young punks in a frontier bar. That was a world that made sense.

“You prick,” Sara fumed. “You selfish asshole. Pick up the goddamn phone.”

There was silence for ten seconds or so, then an abrupt deadness that had a sound of its own.

Monks swilled more vodka. She was absolutely right, he was a prick and a selfish asshole. But she was determined to nurture him, and he had already explained to her, as gently as he could, that if he encountered any nurturing just now he was going to kill somebody.

He was walking the perilous line of that somebody being himself.

The phone rang again a few minutes later. This time the voice was a man’s. Monks listened without interest, expecting it to be another reporter.

“Dr. Monks? This is Andrew Pietowski, with the FBI.”

Monks stiffened.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call ASAP,” Pietowski said. “There’s something important I’d like to discuss with you. Let me give you a couple of numbers where I can be reached.”

Monks heaved himself to his feet and walked unsteadily to the phone, getting it in time to interrupt Pietowski reading out the numbers.

“This is Monks,” he said.

“Doctor, glad you’re home. I don’t know if you remember me.”

“Yes,” Monks said. Pietowski was a Washington, D.C.-based domestic terrorism specialist who had followed the Calamity Jane murders from the beginning-a hefty man in his fifties with a big balding head, big nose, and big ears, a look that was reminiscent of former president Lyndon Johnson. He had flown to California immediately on learning that Freeboot might be involved. Pietowski listened more than he spoke, seeming to prefer staying in the background, but he had the kind of imposing presence that Monks had noticed.

“I’d like to drop by your place, but I thought I’d better call first,” Pietowski said. “I gather you, uh, had a run-in with some newspeople.”

“It was nothing personal. I never actually shot at anybody. I just wanted privacy.”

“I think they got that message.”

Monks braced himself and said, “Is this about Glenn?”

“No. Those results won’t be back for a few more days.”

He sagged with the miserable relief of bad news postponed.

Pietowski broke the silence. “Okay if I come on in?”

“Sure. How soon are we talking?”

“I’m at the foot of your driveway.”

Monks blinked. “I’m not exactly at my best right now.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

It was almost one A.M., he saw with vague surprise. He eyed the wreckage around him with a notion of a hasty cleanup, but decided there was no point in pretending. He poured another drink instead, and waited at the door for Pietowski.

Freeboot had gotten away clean, again. The sad and sordid truth was that the Bronco had, after all, been bugged. The FBI had found three devices, probably planted by Freeboot’s men while Monks had followed Marguerite on the beach, just as he had feared. Freeboot had known from the start that the FBI was coming in. The kidnaping and the agonizing drive to the camp had been a sham to torment Monks, and the FBI’s huge wasted effort, a way of insulting them. Freeboot probably had gone to the camp hours before Monks got there, and left the ear in the guitar case, with a voice-activated light.

Call my name out loud.

And then Freeboot had stayed in the forest long enough to stalk one of the recon agents, disarming him and beating him unconscious with his own rifle-a contemptuous message that he could easily have killed the man. He had worn a ski mask, bolstering the thought that he’d altered his appearance and didn’t want his new face seen. But his bare footprints were easy to identify. Dogs had followed them for two miles. After which, the prints had simply vanished.

Baskett and other agents had given Monks a thorough raking over the coals. They had finally conceded officially that he wasn’t to blame, but it was clear that they blamed him anyway. A lot of attention had focused on Glenn-how deeply he might have been involved in hacking computer information that was instrumental in the selection of the murder victims and facilitating the killings. The fact that Glenn, by all indications, was dead, did not figure in. He was still a criminal in their eyes, and the heavy weight of guilt by association had landed on Monks.

With Freeboot now linked to the Calamity Jane killings, the media furor had been explosive. After the FBI had tossed Monks away like a drained husk, satisfied that he had nothing more to give them, packs of journalists fell upon him. When he finally got to his home, bone weary and heartsick, a crowd of them was waiting.

He might have been able to endure even that, but he had come to realize that the media’s main interest in him didn’t lie in what had happened-it was in fashioning some tawdry story about a dysfunctional family with a renegade son.

He had shoved his way through them into his house, then walked back out with his shotgun, emptying the five-round magazine over their heads amid a shower of leaves and branches from the overhanging trees. After the last of their vehicles spun out of his drive, he had politely carried all of their dropped equipment down to the county road and left it there in a pile. The incident had brought him a warning phone call from the local sheriff’s office, along with several threatened lawsuits from the offended news folk. Other calls were still jamming his line-requests for newspaper and magazine interviews, invitations to appear on national television, feelers from talent agents and film producers for books and made-for-TV movies. But no one had dared come onto his property again.

There was one upside to it all: this time the authorities had hidden Mandrake genuinely and well. The odds of Freeboot’s finding him now were practically nil.

Pietowski’s headlights appeared, coming up the driveway. He parked and got out of the car, a newish generic sedan that was probably from an agency pool. He was wearing a light jacket and slacks, looking more like a realtor on his way to a Kiwanis Club dinner than a man who made a living tracking killers.

“Nice place,” he said. “I see what you mean about liking your privacy. Ever think about putting in a security system?”

“I keep meaning to.”

“You’re not worried about Freeboot paying you a visit?”

“He’s not going to kill me, not any time soon,” Monks said. “He wants me alive, thinking about Glenn.”

Pietowski gave a curt nod. His meaty ears seemed to flop slightly.

“I hate to say it, but you’re probably right,” he said.

Inside the house, Pietowski glanced around with the bland expression that Monks had seen on other FBI agents, absorbing all the information that the room offered. He stepped through the junk on the floor and picked up the open bottle of Finlandia vodka, raising an eyebrow appreciatively.

“Good stuff,” he said. “How long you been going at it?”

“Couple days.”

“Mind if I have one?”

“Help yourself,” Monks said. He waved a hand toward the kitchen. “There’s clean glasses in there someplace. Ice. All that.”

Pietowski moved to the kitchen with his deliberate, almost lumbering walk, and started opening cubboards. His jacket parted as he reached for a glass, giving Monks a glimpse of the leather sling of his shoulder holster.

“So, you’re a Chicago boy,” Pietowski said. He chunked ice cubes into the glass and filled it with the Finlandia. “Me, too. Where’d you go to high school?”

“Saint Leo. Down on the South Side.”

“Sure, I know it. I’m from Saints Cyril and Methodius, myself, up north. Wall-to-wall Polacks.”

Monks got a piece of split oak from the woodbox and knelt in front of the stove. He stirred up the embers with the log, shoved it all the way in, and closed the iron door. He turned back, still on his haunches, then sat on the floor, hard, like a toddler.

Pietowski watched him, with a twist to his mouth that might have indicated sympathy.

“I know you took a hell of a beating,” he said. “You did what you had to. So did we. That’s how you’ve got to look at it.”

Monks exhaled, then nodded. Pietowski extended a hand. Monks took it, and used it to pull himself laboriously back to his feet.

“There’s just been another killing that looks like a Calamity Jane,” Pietowski said.

Monks nodded again. He was too numb to be shocked.

“Happened a couple hours ago, it’s just now crossing the wires,” Pietowski said. “ A Sutton Place penthouse, right in the poshest part of fucking Manhattan. Security like Fort Knox. They got up on the roof somehow and rappeled down an outside wall. But this time we got the shooters.”

A flare of grim excitement cut into Monks’s sluggishness. Finally, something to go on.

“Have you identified them?” he asked.

“We don’t have a clue, which is why I’m here. When they knew they were trapped, one of them dove out a window. Hit the pavement face first, from twelve stories. The second one was right behind him, but a police sniper creased his head and knocked him back inside.”

Pietowski took a six-by-nine-inch manila envelope from his jacket pocket and tossed it on the coffee table.

“This is the one that’s still got a face. I thought maybe you’d recognize him, from the camp.”

Monks remembered the maquis well, even the ones he’d only seen by firelight. He opened the envelope and pulled out several high-resolution black-and-white photos of a man’s face taken from slightly different angles. He was about thirty, clean-shaven, with short, neatly styled hair. It was the same businessman’s look sported by Freeboot’s other maquis, except for the bloody jellied mass of blood and brain where the sniper’s bullet had clipped the right parietal bone, above and behind the ear.

But Monks had to shake his head. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure I never saw him,” he said, tossing the photos back on the table.

“That’s too bad.”

“Sorry I can’t help.”

“I don’t mean you. I mean, that tells us that the ones you saw aren’t the only ones. There’s more of them out there than we thought.”

While Monks ingested this unsettling information, Pietowski started pacing with slow, heavy steps that were like the systematic plodding of a draft horse.

“I’m guessing they were under orders not to be taken alive, so they wouldn’t break down under questioning,” he said. “Maybe even to destroy their faces, to make them harder to identify. Their fingertips were scarred, too, like the ones you saw. Now, what the hell kind of people are willing to sacrifice themselves like that?” He seemed to be asking himself, rather than Monks. “Religious fanatics, suicide bombers, okay. Or somebody in a jealous rage that pulls a murder-suicide. But highly trained operatives do not commit extremely risky crimes, give away what they steal, and then off themselves when they’re cornered. That’s not how they think. Those guys are survivors.”

“Freeboot talked about the assassins,” Monks said. “Their absolute loyalty. The night of that scalp hunt, he told a story about how the Old Man of the Mountain could point at a man and snap his fingers and that man would jump off a cliff to his death.”

Pietowski grunted. “Telling a story’s one thing. Getting people to actually do it-” He shoved his hands into his pockets, then stopped walking and turned back to Monks.

“I’ve got something else to ask you. There’s a buzz, about Bodega Bay. You know the place?”

“I’ve driven through it a fair amount,” Monks said. Bodega Bay was a small, pretty town on the coast about twenty-five miles north of his home-an old fishing harbor that had adapted more and more to recreation, and recently to condos.

“That’s where they filmed that Hitchcock movie The Birds,” Pietowski said. “Remember that, mid-sixties?”

The Birds was the town’s claim to fame as a tourist attraction, although mention of it tended to make residents roll their eyes. Monks recalled, oddly, that early advertisements for it had read: THE BIRDS IS COMING.

“Sure,” he said. “What do you mean, a buzz?”

“The undercover people we’ve got working the streets-they’ve heard a rumble that there’s something coming down there, April 1. We don’t know what. But that ‘Revolution Number 9’ riff is in the air, like it’s some kind of a theme.”

Monks recalled what Marguerite had told him about Freeboot’s cultivating contacts with elements more sinister than the homeless-gangs and big-time drug dealers, via wild parties that centered around the medical marijuana trade.

“So you think Freeboot might be involved?” he said.

“That’s a long shot. And the whole thing might be complete bullshit. It’s April Fool’s Day, for openers. But we can’t ignore it. What I’d like you to do is be there. We’ll have undercover agents, too, but you’re the only reliable witness we’ve got who’s actually seen those people. You go in disguise and hang around. You spot anybody, you alert us.”

“I don’t know that I could do you any good,” Monks said. “They’re going to be in disguise, too. Freeboot told me I looked right at him.”

“Yeah, but you weren’t thinking about him then. If you’re looking, you might see things you recognize. Even the way somebody moves.”

Monks nodded hesitantly. “I’ll try.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll figure out the details.”

Pietowski turned toward the door, then picked up the bottle of vodka and hefted it. The room had gotten warm from the added firewood, and his big doughy forehead was gleaming with sweat.

“For what it’s worth, I’ve crawled into one of these plenty,” Pietowski said. “Last time it happened in a big way was after Waco. I got called in there, after the ATF fucked it up. There were plenty of ways they could have walked up to Koresh and slapped cuffs on him. Instead, all those people burned. Kids.”

He set the bottle back down. “I’d love to jump in right now, believe me, but I can’t afford it. Neither can you.”

After he left, Monks saw that he had barely touched his drink, if at all. Monks had the sudden sense that Pietowski had come to him as a sort of priest, offering absolution, giving him a chance to set aside the past days and move on to action that might be of actual benefit. Ashamed, Monks dumped out his own glass in the sink.

He went to the kitchen calendar and pieced together that today was March 30. Tomorrow was going to be ugly and penitential, filled with sweat and pain-splitting wood, lifting weights, and working the heavy bag to a base line of pain throbbing in his head like the rap music blasting from a passing car.

Then, the wait to find out if this rumor was an April Fool’s Day joke or the next outrage that Freeboot planned to throw in the world’s face.

36

Monks was in a hotel room in Bodega Bay just coming out of a restless half-sleep when the phone rang. It was 5:33 A.M., the morning of April 1. He located the phone’s red LED in the darkened room and picked up.

“Monks,” he said.

“This is Pietowski. Turn on the TV, any news channel. Call me back.” He sounded enraged. Monks finished waking up instantly, fearing that he’d done something wrong.

He found the TV’s remote and started flicking through channels. His finger stopped at the fourth one he hit. An attractive blond anchorwoman was at her desk in the foreground, with the CNN logo on the backdrop.

“…was e-mailed to millions of computers around the nation, from an unknown source, early this morning,” she said. “A list of five hundred names and addresses, titled-apparently, with vicious sarcasm-‘The Fortune 500,’ includes prominent members of the business community, legislators, and government officials-among them, all the victims of the Calamity Jane killers.

“Initial response from law-enforcement agencies is that the list is an April Fool’s Day prank. But the people whose names are on the list are alarmed that it’s a warning-that they’re intended targets, too.

“We’ll have more on this explosive new development after this short break. Stay with us.”

Monks punched the number of Pietowski’s cell phone. They had talked enough times during the past two days that he had memorized it by now.

“I only got part of the story,” Monks said.

“Freeboot just stomped on the panic button, is the story. Sent out a mass e-mail that looks like a piece of spam, except it could only have been compiled by some highly sophisticated hacking.”

“The news announcer said the police were treating it as a joke.”

“Joke, my aching ass. They got the addresses of people that are harder to find than Osama bin Laden. Cracked fire-walled corporate and government databases, identified people who operate way, way behind the scenes.”

Monks swallowed a dry lump at the back of his throat. That pointed to Glenn, and the FBI agents knew it. Yet it fanned the flicker of hope that he was still alive.

“We’re already spread thin, and now we’ve got five hundred of the world’s most influential people screaming at us about what we’re going to do to protect them,” Pietowski said sourly. “Anything happening there?”

Monks walked to a window and opened the curtain. The view looked west over the town along Highway 1, and down the long spur of Doran Beach farther out, a favorite spot of windsurfers and body boarders. It was just dawn, and the vast expanse of ocean and sky was a pale gray-blue that would soon turn to azure. The highway was empty. The sea was calm, the surf hardly more than ripples. Toward the harbor’s north end, the fishing fleet and recreational boats floated in the marina like beasts of burden grazing in a peaceful pasture, waiting to be put to use.

Informants had confirmed a rumor on the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities all the way to L.A. and Seattle, that some sort of mass party was supposed to take place in Bodega Bay today, and that “Revolution No. 9” seemed to be the motif. But the odds of finding Freeboot here seemed tiny, and Pietowski even feared that it might be a diversion from something serious, like another Calamity Jane killing.

“Right now, the place looks quiet as a tomb,” Monks told him.

“I guess that’s good, except it means we’re going to waste a lot of manpower. Call me again when you’re ready to hit the bricks. We’ll run a test on your microphone.”

Monks got a cold bottle of orange juice out of the room’s mini-refrigerator, then started making coffee, using half the specified amount of water. He shaved in the shower, mirrorless, a habit he’d carried over from his navy days.

When he came back out, he poured a cup of the thick black brew and stepped to the window again, still grappling with his hope that the “Fortune 500 List” might mean that Glenn was still alive-and his fear that if so, it deepened his involvement in the killings even further.

Outside, the sky was lighter, but things remained as tranquil as before. Local police and sheriffs had been alerted, but everyone agreed that it would be best to stay quiet, rather than alarm residents over what might amount to nothing.

A single car came into sight, driving into town on Highway 1 from the south. Monks kept watching it. It was a big old sedan, an Olds or a Buick, 1970s or even sixties vintage, dented and crusted with dirt that looked as permanent as paint-not the kind of vehicle that was common around upscale Bodega Bay. He could hear its rumble all the way up to his room. It moved slowly, giving the sense that it wasn’t in a hurry to get to anyplace in particular-it was just cruising.

As it drove past his window, an arm flopped carelessly out of the rear passenger-side window and flicked a cigarette butt that skipped a few times on the pavement, throwing off sparks.

The car kept going north on the highway, then turned left on Westshore Road, which led down toward the marina and campgrounds.

37

By noon, Bodega Bay ’s marina was thronged with people-close to five thousand, Monks judged, with more still pouring in. Parking areas were jammed with vehicles, a lot of them junkers, along with a fair number of chopped Harleys. The newer arrivals were parking some distance away and walking in, since vehicle traffic was almost impossible. The strip of Highway 1 through town, with its shops and restaurants, was clogged.

It was looking like The Birds, all right-only this time it was thick with human beings.

Monks wandered around the fringes, wearing the disguise that Pietowski’s makeup specialists had provided-ragged jeans, worn-out boots, a threadbare army field jacket. His wiry black hair was dyed gray, then worked with pomade to straighten it and give it a greasy, matted look. One of his incisors was blacked out to appear missing. A thick beard and mustache, along with a weathered baseball cap pulled low over sunglasses, hid most of his face. A tiny receiver was planted in his left ear and a body bug microphone was sewn inside his collar, giving him two-way contact with an FBI listening post set up in a phony delivery truck parked nearby.

The day was pristine, clear, warm with sunshine but cooled by a light ocean breeze. The scene was outwardly festive, something like the mass concerts or happenings of the late sixties-but Monks percieved an undercurrent that was disturbingly different. These weren’t kids who had come to party, to soak up the music, grooviness, peace, and love. These were fully formed adults, most of them well past their teens and many pushing middle age and bearing the hard look of years on the streets or in jails. Even the younger faces tended toward an uncaring cynicism, a sense that nothing they saw was of value or even interest.

He eavesdropped on conversations as he cruised, trying to get a sense of what this gathering was all about, but nothing became clear. There didn’t seem to be any kind of central event planned. All that he could glean was that some mysterious groundswell had named today as the day, and Bodega Bay as the place, for a party. There was a lot of beer and screw-cap wine. Marijuana smoke drifted through the air, and he was sure that there was plenty of hard dope around, too.

So far, all was peaceable. But several police cars had moved into the marina, inching their way through the crowd, which parted, grudgingly, to let them pass, then immediately closed to swallow them like a giant amoeba engulfing its prey. A white-and-red Coast Guard patrol boat was hovering just outside the mouth of the harbor’s channel, and Monks had seen three different helicopters-a Coast Guard Dolphin, a dark green Bell sheriffs’ search-and-rescue craft, and a small one he couldn’t identify that was probably the media. Not surprisingly, the local residents looked alarmed.

The cricket-like chirp of Monks’s cell phone in his coat pocket startled him. He had brought it as a backup in case radio contact failed, but he hadn’t expected it to ring, and he didn’t want to be seen using it. He angled his steps away from the crowd with covert speed, shielding the phone with his hand to talk, as if he were coughing.

“This is Monks,” he said.

“Oh, God, you’ve got to help me.” The woman’s voice was shaking, the words spilling out in a fearful rush.

But Monks recognized Marguerite. This was the first time anyone had heard from her since the night that she had slipped away from him on the beach.

Startled, he said, “Yes, of course, honey. Tell me what you need.”

“You were right, he killed Motherlode, and he wants to let Mandrake die. I know that now. What if my baby’s not perfect? He’ll do the same thing.”

“Your baby?” Monks said, with swiftly deepening surprise.

Then he understood.

“Jesus, Marguerite, are you pregnant?” he said. “By Freeboot?”

“He chose me to start his new dynasty,” she sobbed. “Then I found out the truth. Now he doesn’t trust me anymore. I’m just a, a thing, like a cow. Breeding stock. He’s keeping me here. Please, come get me and hide me.”

Monks strode deeper into the scrubby headland vegetation and raised his voice, knowing that Pietowski would hear at least his end of the conversation.

“Where are you?” he asked her.

“He won’t tell me. Somewhere back in the woods, like always. He’s gone now, but there’s others around. I’m sneaking this call, I can’t let them see me.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“ Bodega Bay. Him and some others.”

Monks’s scalp bristled. “What does Freeboot look like now?”

“I don’t know. They’re all wearing disguises and I didn’t see them leave. Oh, God, I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Come on, Marguerite, think. There has to be something that will help us find him. Then you’ll be safe.”

There was a several-second pause. “Callus,” she said tremulously. “He’s the one you shot. He’ll be limping.”

Monks had a grim flash of satisfaction. He hadn’t known until now that Callus, the maquis who had beaten his shins, was the man he had shot. But a glance at the teeming crowd mocked the hope of finding a single limping man among the thousands.

“Keep talking,” he said. “Think out loud. What else?”

“Someone’s coming.” Her voice sharpened with panic. “I have to go.”

“Marguerite, call back and stay on the line,” Monks said urgently.

But a man’s voice cut harshly into the background on her end. “Hey, what the fuck you doing? Give me that.”

“Chill out, man,” she said shrilly. Then she squealed in fear or pain.

“Marguerite!” Monks yelled.

There was a brief scuffling noise, a clonk as if the phone had hit the floor, more of her squealing and unintelligible words. Then the connection went dead.

Monks clenched the phone in his fist, willing it to ring again, knowing that it would not.

“Andrew, did you get that?” he said into the transmitter.

“Some of it.” Pietowski’s voice was tinny in Monks’s ear, but his vexation came through. “We’re already looking for the limper. You got any more description on him?”

Monks remembered Callus, all right-his ruthless face and brutal efficiency.

“Five-ten to six feet, athletic, hard-looking. Very clean cut when I saw him, like the others. Nothing that stood out.”

It wasn’t much help, but Pietowski said, “All right, now we know they’re here. Let’s go rip some new assholes.”

Monks moved back toward the crowd, his rage at Freeboot and the maquis boiling up afresh. With it came a weight of worry for Marguerite. It seemed that she had finally come to her senses-but at what price?

38

Traffic moved at a crawl along Highway 1 through Bodega Bay, choked by the thousands of pedestrians and hundreds of cars parked illegally along the roadside. A forty-foot Bounder RV edged along in the stream, another bewildered and frightened tourist trying to get through this wild mess. But then it pulled over into a space conveniently vacated by two cars, just as it arrived. The passing crowd swirled around the big rig like water around a stone, but not without offering up plenty of jeering, hostile glances, and occasional raised fingers to this symbol of leisure and wealth.

Shielded behind the smoked windows, Freeboot watched them stonily, with the mixture of pity and contempt that rare men like him-men of great vision and ability-had always held for society’s losers, whose asses had first to be kicked into realizing the power they held, and then into using it. In fact, the RV was just the opposite of what it seemed-a command post for an army that didn’t yet know it existed. And the first battle in the war was coming together out there on the streets right now.

The RV’s parking spot, secured early that morning by the maquis, was a vantage point on high ground, with a clear view of the marina below. Within a couple of minutes, Freeboot saw a California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop approaching, navigating slowly but steadily through the throng. Tension and disdain were obvious in the faces he passed, but no one was ready to take on The Man.

Yet.

Freeboot moved to the RV’s passenger door and opened it. Anyone who saw him would have taken him for a middle-aged tourist. He looked completely different than he had three months ago. He had spent a lot of that time in Panama. That was a great place-mescal, cocaine, pretty women, and plastic surgeons who didn’t ask questions. His cheeks and nose had been thickened, a chin implant added, and his ears angled forward to give him a bearlike look. His hair and beard were short, white, and well trimmed. He wore a padded shirt and a fanny pack across his belly to accentuate a paunch. But underneath it, his ferally strong body was the same.

The cop pulled up to the door, straddling his big BMW motorcycle. His brawny forearms and biceps stretched the short sleeves of his tan shirt. A Smith & Wesson.40-caliber automatic rode high on his right hip. He wore knee-high black boots, tight black gloves, and aviator sunglasses.

Behind the glasses, Freeboot knew, Hammerhead’s eyes were bloodshot and crazed with meth.

The passing crowd drifted away from this exchange-a cop probably checking on the safety of the RV’s well-off passengers, maybe offering them an escort out of here.

“It’s going to start real soon,” Freeboot said quietly. “Get it done, and ride out like a son of a bitch. You’ll be gone before they know what happened.”

Hammerhead’s lips were set in a tight line-the tough look of a cop in a tense situation. But they moved in a sudden tremor, and a little froth of saliva spilled out of one corner of his mouth.

“You talked to her again?” he said.

Freeboot assented, a slow, assured raising of his head.

“Just a little while ago,” he said. “Marguerite’s had some wrong ideas, but that’s all over. She’ll be waiting when you get back.”

Hammerhead’s corded forearms flexed as he put the bike in gear and accelerated away.

Taxman stepped from the RV’s rear section, carrying a long nylon duffel bag, the kind that athletes used for equipment. Inside it was a Remington model 700.308-caliber rifle with a Leupold scope. He lowered the passenger-side window a few inches and raised the gun to his shoulder, keeping all of it but the scope inside the bag, slipping the tip of the muzzle out through a slit and bracing it in the window opening. The crosshairs found Hammerhead’s white helmet and followed it.

“You going to be able to pick him out?” Freeboot said.

“As long as everybody’s where they’re supposed to be.” Taxman stashed the bag in a cabinet.

“If they’re not,” Freeboot said, “get creative.”

He kicked off his shoes and stripped off the padded shirt, replacing it with a Kevlar vest.

Inside the RV’s bathroom, Shrinkwrap was putting the finishing touches on her young lover’s disguise, kneeling before him and dabbing Mehron stage makeup on his face while he sat on the closed toilet lid.

“Perfect,” she said, holding up a compact mirror in front of him.

Glenn Monks stared into it, looking like he had stage fright. His lips parted, showing his blistered teeth and gums.

“Don’t be scared, baby,” she said softly. “I’m very proud of you. I know how much it’s hurt you, everybody thinking you’re just a computer geek. Today, you make full maquis. Remember, as soon as it starts, clean up with these”-she tapped the packet of moist towelettes in his shirt pocket-“and get your ass back here.”

He nodded, swallowing dryly.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to say when you get up there?” she asked in a teasing voice.

“People, y’all listen to me.” His voice was shaky, and it cracked.

“Don’t panic, try it again,” she coaxed. “You’re cool, baby, you’re the coolest rapper I’ve ever heard. Just be you.”

“People, y’all listen to me,” he cried out, with strained force. “We here today to talk about gettin’ back what The Man been takin’ away from us.”

“Perfect,” she said again, rubbing his thighs through his pants, comically baggy jeans worn with the waistband just above his pubis and the cuffs dragging on the ground.

Her hands moved to the zipper. “Now lean back and close your eyes,” she whispered. “I’m going to give my brave soldier a good-luck present.”

A few minutes later, she walked with him to the RV’s cab and watched him slip out into the crowd. It hurt. He had touched that deep, sweet spot in her. But Freeboot was right-the meth had been getting to him, making him petulant, unreliable, tiresome to be around, and a risk if he got caught. It was a hard truth of all successful politics that sometimes, individuals had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

There were plenty of other lovely boys out there, younger ones, with bright white smiles.

39

Striding back to the marina, Monks was jolted by the fear that it had caught on fire. What looked like a wave of flame was sweeping through the crowd.

Then he realized that he was seeing several hundred garish T-shirts, colored nuclear sunset orange, worn by the oncoming partyers.

A closer look stunned him even more. The T-shirts’ central logo was a cartoonishly ugly vulture with an evil grin, pinning the neck of a squealing lamb with one taloned foot, while ripping out its guts with the other. Above that, in large bold letters, was printed: THE BIRDS IS BACK, BABY!

And below it, bloodred and shaped like jagged lightning flashes driving into the scorched earth, were the characters REV # 9.

“Are you seeing these T-shirts?” he said into his hidden microphone.

“There’s cars with trunkfuls of them-they’re handing them out free,” Pietowski growled. “The caps, too.”

Monks hadn’t yet noticed those, but now he saw that most of the T-shirt wearers were also sporting dark blue or black stocking caps, pulled down low over foreheads and ears, hiphop style.

“Now they all fucking look alike,” Pietowski said. “We’re going to disperse them. Watch yourself, this could get rough.”

Monks was starting to hear the faint, faraway sound of sirens over the clamor of the many-thousand-limbed beast that prowled around him. The crowd heard it, too, and the noise level dropped as people turned to look toward Highway 1. Seaward, the throbbing pulse of helicopters thickened as they moved closer. Another swift, purposeful Coast Guard cutter was approaching from the direction of San Francisco. The local police and sheriffs, helmeted and wearing riot gear, were getting out of their cars, trying to start moving the crowd off the marina and back toward the highway. Knots of confrontation were forming, the partyers reacting with anger and taunts.

“People!”

Monks swung toward the sound, shouted over a megaphone. It came from a young black man wearing a stocking cap and one of the garish orange T-shirts. He had climbed up on top of a fish-processing shed at Spud Point, where the crowd was thickest.

Holding the megaphone to his lips, he yelled again.

“People, y’all listen to me. We here today to talk about gettin’ back what The Man been takin’ away from us.”

Monks absorbed instantaneous and disturbing impressions. The accent didn’t sound quite right-it had the ring of a white man trying to imitate black speech. The voice was high-pitched, strained-

And yet, even over the megaphone, familiar.

“Oh, Christ,” he breathed, and took a running step to throw his arms around his living son. Then he stopped just as fast and hovered, breathing hard, torn between the need to get to Glenn and the fear of what was going to happen to him when the police got him.

“Now I want y’all to look around you,” Glenn called out. He pranced on his perch, starting to gain confidence. “There is strength in numbers. Yeah! Look how many of us there are.”

As more heads turned toward him and the crowd’s noise quieted further, the sirens and thunder of the chopper rotors rose, as if a giant volume knob was being turned up. The Coast Guard patrol boat was discharging armed men at the harbor’s mouth, and the sheriffs’ helicopter was landing on the headlands to the west, dropping what looked like a SWAT team. Red and blue lights were lining Highway 1, popping like flashbulbs at a celebrity wedding.

“Now, when The Man put on his uniform, he think it give him the right to walk all over us. But when we put on our uniform-” Glenn pulled the T-shirt away from his skinny chest and patted himself on the head in demonstration-“well, he don’t know who we be. So that give us some rights, too. Y’all see where I’m coming from?”

“Cease and desist!” a much louder voice interrupted. This one was coming through an amplified microphone mounted on a Sonoma County sheriff’s truck, not just a handheld bullhorn. “This is a police order. You with the megaphone-come down and walk forward with your hands up. People in the crowd, start dispersing peacefully.”

“You think they gonna arrest us all?” Glenn shouted scornfully. “Where they gonna put us? The jails are already full, baby! Full of people who smoked a joint, or stole some food ’cause they was starving! While the motherfuckers who stole your jobs and your homes and your dignity, they flying around in private jets! Yeah!”

A different kind of murmur was starting to rise from the crowd, with a tone of angry assent. Monks saw several clenched fists raised into the air.

“This is an unlawful assembly,” the police microphone bellowed. “I repeat, disperse yourselves peacefully.”

The cops on foot were shoving their way toward Glenn now, but the crowd was shoving back. Nightsticks started to flail. Monks fought his way along, his hesitation gone-in a panic to get to Glenn and drag him out of this insanity.

“Andrew, that’s my son up there. That’s Glenn!” Monks yelled into his microphone. “I need help getting him safe!”

“Ten-four that,” Pietowski said. “We’re coming.”

Monks was twenty yards away from the shed when a California Highway Patrolman on a motorcycle came charging through the tangled mass of people, running straight into whoever got in his way and kicking them aside. Monks got a glimpse of his bull neck and broad back.

As the cop passed in front of the shed, he slowed and unholstered his pistol, raising it to aim at Glenn.

Monks stared, rigid with disbelief.

Then he yelled, “No,” and threw himself forward, grabbing shoulders and handfuls of clothing to claw his way through the crowd.

A man with the look of a biker snarled, “Watch it, fucker,” and punched him hard in the side of the head, knocking his sunglasses flying. Monks reeled, tripping over legs-

Hearing the terrible thumps of high-powered gunshots.

When he fought his way to his feet again, Glenn was gone from sight. The motorcycle cop was riding on, waving his pistol. Now people screamed and trampled each other to get out of his path.

And then, a black spiderweb the size of a half-dollar appeared on the back of the cop’s white helmet, like an eggshell shattering. It slammed him forward over the careening bike’s handlebars.

“Eleven ninety-nine, officer down!” the police microphone roared. “Code Three for all law-enforcement personnel!”

Monks struggled on toward where Glenn had been, now trying to keep from getting knocked down and stomped to raw meat by the fleeing human torrent. People were surging in all directions, even swarming over the marina’s moored boats and leaping into the channel. Through the yells and screams around him and the pounding in his own ears, he was aware of more gunfire, and he caught glimpses of shouting cops with raised weapons. A cordon of police had formed around the fallen Highway Patrolman, shielding him from the stampede.

“…return fire!” he heard the microphone boom. “There are snipers in the crowd! Repeat, officers are authorized to return fire!”

Monks made it to the shed where Glenn had been perched and clambered up the webbed iron frame of a derrick to the roof. Two cops were already up there, crouched, swiveling tensely with pistols ready, watching the chaos below.

Glenn lay off to one side, prone and still.

Monks jumped from the derrick onto the roof. Both cops swung to face him, aiming at him with two-handed combat grips.

“Stop right there!” one bellowed.

“That’s my son,” Monks shouted, and kept coming.

“I don’t give a fuck! Turn around and get out of here.”

“Wait a minute, you saying you know this kid?” the other one said. He yanked his handcuffs from his belt and started toward Monks. “Get down, asshole. On your face, hands behind you-”

“I’m FBI and that man’s a doctor!” a hard voice broke in, yelling up at them from below. “Stand back and let him work.”

It was Pietowski, striding toward the shed with a pistol raised in one hand and his FBI badge in the other. He was flanked by two men who looked like undercover agents, dressed like Monks in funky outfits, but also brandishing guns.

The cops on the roof hesitated, looking at each other. Monks pushed past them and dropped to his knees beside Glenn. His fingers smeared the greasy blackface makeup as he checked for vital signs. Glenn was breathing, and the pulse in his carotid artery was faint but steady. There were no obvious wounds. Monks turned him carefully onto his back.

Glenn’s half-closed eyes opened a little wider in recognition or surprise. He tried to say something, but only blood came from his mouth, bubbling between his lips.

“Hush,” Monks said. “Don’t try to talk.”

He could hear Pietowski behind him, up on the roof now. “This situation’s under control,” Pietowski told the two policemen. “You men can get on down and help your buddies.”

“If this guy’s really a doctor, he should be taking care of cops, not this maggot,” one muttered.

“With all due respect, officer, you don’t know zip minus shit about it,” Pietowski said harshly. “There’s still shooters out there. Go find them.”

Monks’s fingers located an entry wound in Glenn’s chest, below the sternum and a couple of inches to the right. His mouth bleeding almost certainly meant that the bullet had punctured that lung, but the lung hadn’t yet collapsed, and there were no indications that his heart or spine had been hit. Monks’s hands kept searching over the rest of Glenn’s body. He had heard the motorcycle cop fire at least three shots. But there seemed to be no other wounds. Probably, the first round had knocked Glenn spinning away and down, and the others had missed.

He eased the stocking cap off Glenn’s head, dreading what he’d find. But both of Glenn’s ears, minus the earring, looked just fine.

“How is he?” Pietowski asked.

“Lucky.”

“Paramedics are on their way. We’ll get him on a chopper.”

Monks kept his hands on Glenn, reading his instant-by-instant condition through them, automatically making small adjustments-keeping his nostrils clear, loosening his clothing. With good prompt care, Glenn was going to make it.

A team of two paramedics arrived within minutes, carrying a backboard. Monks helped them ease Glenn onto it, and watched them closely as they strapped him down and lowered him to another team, waiting on the ground with a gurney. They seemed competent, but he intended to go with them to the hospital, and he started to follow them off the roof.

Pietowski caught his arm. “There’s people lying on the ground who need you here,” he said, pointing at the havoc below.

The crowd was thinning at the marina by now, most of it surging up into town. Monks didn’t hear any more gunfire, but there was still plenty of panic. Cars were ramming each other, driving over curbs, through yards, into buildings. The metallic crunch of collisions pierced the air, and shards of splintering glass from windshields and storefronts sprayed out here and there, glittering in the sunlight. Thousands more were fleeing on foot, swarming like locusts along the highway, through the shops and restaurants, up the streets and into the clusters of condos on the hills. Police helicopters hovered close overhead, megaphones bellowing warnings, but it looked like nothing short of napalm could stop the frenzy. At least a dozen people had fallen and were lying motionless or struggling feebly. A couple of them were wearing police uniforms. Monks remembered that he had heard the words over the police bullhorn: There are snipers in the crowd.

The paramedics with Glenn had reached a Life Flight helicopter and were loading him on.

“Don’t worry, we’re not going to let anything happen to him,” Pietowski said.

Monks nodded, but he knew the bitter truth behind that concern. Glenn was a big prize, the only one the FBI had apprehended so far in connection with the Calamity Jane murders. He was also the best hope they had of tracking down Freeboot.

The nearest of the fallen bodies was the Highway Patrolman who had shot Glenn. Several angry-looking cops were hovering around, and another team of paramedics had arrived, but Monks was quite sure even from a distance that he was dead. The crash had dumped him in an ugly sprawl, with one jackbooted leg still tangled in the handlebars of his bike.

“Stand aside,” Pietowski said again, flashing his badge. “This man’s a doctor.” The cops and paramedics moved back.

Monks knelt beside the man who had tried to kill his son. He had been shot twice. He might have survived the round to the helmet, but the second one, just below its rim, was lethal. Monks knew that that was a preferred target of SWAT-team and military snipers-through the spinal cord into the medulla oblongata.

Then he recognized the thick-featured face, and his rage turned to shock.

“This isn’t a cop,” he said to Pietowski. “He’s one of Freeboot’s men. Hammerhead-the one who had that jade pendant.”

Monks was still crouched there, trying to grasp this new insanity, when one of the FBI undercover agents stepped away from the group, pressing his hand against his ear, listening.

Then he yelled, “They spotted a guy with a limp, up on the highway!”

Agents and cops took off running, the younger men at a sprint. Monks and Pietowski followed, lumbering and panting. Other uniformed men with raised weapons were running on Highway 1.

“He’s getting into that RV!” someone yelled.

Monks saw the vehicle, a huge white box on wheels, almost the size of a bus. There was no way that it was going anywhere in this jam. Anybody inside it was trapped.

“Attention! Inside the RV!” the megaphone on the sheriff’s truck bellowed. “Come out with your hands up!”

Dozens of cops, Coast Guard, and SWAT-teamers ringed the RV, taking cover behind parked cars.

“Everybody stay the hell back,” Pietowski yelled. “That thing could be rigged to explode.” He looked pleased but wary. There was still plenty of risk, and the possibility of a drawn-out siege.

Monks started to hear a bizarre sound that seemed to be coming from inside the RV-a screaming whine like a dozen chain saws being revved. The others heard it, too. Talk stopped and the megaphone went silent.

Then the RV did explode, the entire barn-door-sized back panel bursting free with a gut-wrenching kuh-whump, spinning through the air like a giant tin can lid showering shrapnel. A cloud of thick smoke billowed out with it, sending the nearest cops spinning away and clawing at their faces.

In the midst of that, several MX-type dirt bikes came flying out of the RV’s rear section. The gas-masked, helmeted riders hit the pavement, submachine guns slung across their chests, spraying full automatic bursts that hammered into the parked cars and buildings. The bikes tore through the smoke, splitting off in different directions. Cops fired back furiously, and one bike went into a skid, sliding into a curb and throwing the rider hard against a car.

Monks saw that another of the riders, incredibly, had bare feet.

“That’s Freeboot!” he screamed. “The barefoot one!” He ran forward into the acrid reek of the gas, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve, pointing with his other hand. Through burning eyes, he saw the barefoot rider jerk suddenly, in the convulsive spasm of a man hit by a bullet. But he recovered, popping the bike up in a wheelstand and skidding around in a half-circle. Front wheel still raised, he tore back through the heart of the smoke cloud and appeared again a few seconds later, weaving and leaping like the others through the jammed traffic. Helicopters thundered overhead in pursuit.

Pietowski watched them go, his face taut with controlled rage.

“He looked like he got hit,” Monks said.

Pietowski nodded grimly. “That makes me feel a little better.”

They walked to where the fallen rider lay, surrounded by glowering cops, red-eyed from gas. The body was crumpled and motionless against the car it had struck. The torso looked padded, and Monks realized that the rider was wearing body armor. Probably all of them had been, along with bullet-resistant helmets. But blood was seeping from under the jaw-a lucky shot for the cop that had fired it, the end of luck for the rider. Monks knelt to feel for a pulse, but he already knew, again, that life was gone.

“He’s dead,” Monks said, standing. “You can move him.”

“Let’s see who we got,” Pietowski said.

A deputy knelt and eased the helmet off, revealing soft auburn hair and a thin, almost pretty face. He stepped back in shock.

“Jesus,” he said, “it’s a woman.”

“Shrinkwrap,” Monks said. This time, he felt neither anger nor pity, and by now, not even surprise.

Pietowski nodded. “Nice catch, gentlemen,” he said to the cops. “She was a kingpin.”

Highway 1 looked like a mile-long junkyard, crammed with vehicles too impacted to move. The remnants of the crowd were still spiderwebbing out in the distance, over the headlands to the north, across the crescent beach south, and up into the coastal hills to the east. At least another thousand still lined the streets, many huddled on the ground or crouched behind shelter, and there were new casualties from the motorcyclists’ gunfire, explosion, and general mayhem.

“I’d better get to helping,” Monks told Pietowski, and walked out into the chaos, scanning the injured, doing triage in his head as he decided where to start.

40

Thirty hours later, Monks walked into Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa to see Glenn. Most of the serious casualties from Bodega Bay had been taken either to Santa Rosa Memorial or to Bayview, in Marin County. But the FBI wanted their star witness separated from the pack, and the Queen was known for its top-notch trauma center. He was under full-time guard by teams of two armed agents, in case Freeboot’s maquis came looking for him to silence him.

Glenn wasn’t yet strong enough for serious interrogation. So far, the impatient agents had been limited to a few brief sessions. But he was able to talk a little, and, knowing now that Freeboot had set him up to be killed, was cooperating fully. He had already given them valuable information, including details on hideouts and communication systems, and a description of what Freeboot looked like now.

And he had tacitly admitted hacking the computer information on the “Fortune 500” list.

Via Pietowski, Monks had arranged to get a few minutes alone with Glenn. The agents on guard were expecting him. He identified himself to them, stepped into the room, and closed the door. He glanced approvingly at the medical arrangements-EKG monitor, saline IV with antibiotics, nasal oxygen tubes. It was just the kind of setup he would have used.

Glenn was sitting up in the adjustable bed. He looked uncomfortable and scared, but intact. The severed ear had been another of Freeboot’s mental tortures. He had demanded Glenn’s earring and Glenn had handed it over, without any idea of what it would be used for. Whose ear it was that Monks had found might never be known.

“You getting enough pain meds?” Monks asked.

Glenn nodded, and pointed to the call button on the bed arm. “They come right away.” With the strain of the injured lung, his voice was a husky whisper.

“I’ll keep this short, Glenn,” Monks said. “I need to know the truth about some things. Just between you and me. No one else will ever know.” He pulled a chair up to the bedside and leaned close, watching Glenn’s face intently.

“Did you know that Freeboot and the maquis were committing the Calamity Jane murders?” Monks said. “That that’s what they were doing with the names and addresses you provided?”

Glenn shook his head emphatically.

“No way, man. He told me we were putting together information on enemies of the people. I never dreamed anybody was getting killed.”

Monks kept his face emotionless, but his fear took a sickening jump. Before Glenn had spoken, his eyes had flickered away just a tiny bit-the look of the same boy that Monks had raised, a very smart, accomplished liar, who was undoubtedly aware that the issue was going to be crucial in his sentencing.

Monks steeled himself for the next, almost worse, question. “Were you the one who attacked me and cut off my hair, that night in the camp?”

“That was Shrinkwrap. She wanted to get back at you for pissing her off.” This time, Glenn seemed disinterested, as if the issue wasn’t at all important. That had the ring of truth.

“Do you think she was in on setting you up?” Monks said, perhaps cruelly.

“I don’t know.” Glenn’s head rolled to the side, facing away.

“All right, I’ll let you rest.” Monks stood. “We’re there for you, your mom and me. You know that, son.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Glenn’s voice was laced with unmistakable sarcasm. But at least he hadn’t brutalized and humiliated his father, and there was some relief in knowing that.

In the hospital’s lobby, Monks stopped at a pay-phone kiosk and called Glenn’s mother. She hadn’t yet been allowed to visit him, and Monks had promised to check in.

“I just talked to him,” Monks said. “He’s doing fine.”

“Fine?” Gail said shrilly. “He’s going to prison, isn’t he?”

Monks exhaled. “That’s going to depend on a lot of factors.”

Pietowski had assured Monks that if Glenn was what he seemed-a dope-ridden pawn under the brainwashing influence of Freeboot and Shrinkwrap and who hadn’t been part of any violent acts-a plea bargain with a minimum sentence could be reached.

But if it was proved that Glenn had known about the killings, that would be a very different order of business.

“He should have a lawyer with him every second,” Gail fumed.

“He needs to tell the FBI everything he knows, as fast as he can,” Monks said, trying to stay patient. “If they have to put up with a lawyer interfering, you can bet he’s going to prison. We’re talking killers out there.”

“I think you’re handling this horribly!”

“Why am I not surprised,” Monks said and hung up.

He walked on outside to the parking lot. The afternoon was clear and sunny. Queen of the Valley was a long, low modern building surrounded by greenery and trees, without the forbidding aspect of older, urban hospitals. But all hospitals had plenty of grief and guilt passing through their walls.

Monk was terrified that Glenn was guilty and would be punished-and almost as afraid that he would scheme his way out of it.

When Monks had left Bodega Bay, after hours of helping paramedics evacuate casualties, the town looked like it had been hit by an earthquake. Storefronts were shattered, shops and private homes savaged and looted by the fleeing mob. Police were still dealing with the tangle of abandoned vehicles. Most of the crowd had gotten away, catching rides in the cars that had managed to get out, or melting into the woods and nearby communities. Police eventually questioned hundreds of stragglers and detained dozens, but, owing to the identical T-shirts and caps, it was almost impossible to figure out who had done what.

It was clear that the riot had been carefully orchestrated. Glenn’s instructions had been to incite the crowd until the police intervened, then wipe off his blackface makeup and get back to the RV. But no one had said anything to him about shooting.

What happened next seemed to have been a series of double-crosses planned by Freeboot. Hammerhead, dressed as a Highway Patrolman, had inflamed the mob by shooting the speaker who was championing them. A sniper then killed him, enraging the cops, who had taken him for one of their own. More snipers kept shooting at police, who returned fire into the crowd, and from there, it was unchecked mayhem. Police and media videos showed armed bikers and gangstas joining the attack. Six law enforcement officers had been killed and eleven wounded. The civilian toll was more than twice that. Many more people had been injured in other ways, some of them local residents-trampled, beaten, cut by flying glass, hit by the cars trying to escape. Three women had reported being raped, and there were probably more who hadn’t come forward.

Only one of the escaping dirt-bikers had been caught-Callus, the limper who had given the RV away. He was being held in isolation on twenty-four-hour suicide watch, refusing to say a word. Freeboot might be wounded or even dead, but his status as a daring Robin Hood figure had jumped explosively.

And his message of the ugly violence hovering close at hand had come through loud and clear.

Monks found his car, the same rental that he had driven to Bodega Bay. His Bronco was highly visible, and he wanted to stay underground just now. Besides the threat of Freeboot and his men still at large, Monks had been propelled into another media furor. This time, he had checked into a Napa motel under a phony ID that he sometimes used for investigation work.

He drove across the north edge of Napa, crossing Highway 29, once a charming little road through the grand old California wineries, now a major traffic artery. The motel was a mile or so south on a frontage road-big, modern, and anonymous, just what he wanted.

When he opened the door to his room, he caught the faint scent of perfume. Then he saw another suitcase on the extra bed, open beside his own.

Sara was curled up in an armchair, sipping wine, looking out the window over the expanse of greening vineyards to the west. She turned at the sound of his entry. They hadn’t seen each other since the night that Monks had abducted Mandrake. He’d invited her to join him here, and had left instructions at the desk to give her a key, but he hadn’t been sure that she would come.

“How did it go?” she said. Her eyes were soft with concern.

“It could have been better. Worse, too.”

“He’s okay?”

“Physically,” Monks said.

She stood and came to him. He put his hands on her waist and kissed her. She started crying. Monks held her, feeling helpless. Now she was the one waiting to find out whether her child was alive. Acting on Glenn’s information, police had raided the place where Marguerite had called from, an isolated backwoods shack near the tiny town of Annapolis. But it was deserted by the time they got there, and she hadn’t been heard from again.

“He’s not going to hurt her, she’s carrying his bloodline,” Monks said, although the fear that he was wrong was another bitter gnawing in his heart.

“I just want it over,” Sara said shakily. “Lia back home again, everything like it used to be.”

“Soon,” Monks said, stroking her hair. “The net’s closing on Freeboot.”

“I want him dead,” she whispered.

41

Six days later, late in the afternoon, Monks was driving back to his house from Sara’s and stopped for gas in Santa Rosa, at one of those big plazas with a dozen pumps and a convenience store. The price of gasoline had gone up ten or fifteen cents per gallon since he’d last filled up, a couple of weeks earlier. He put thirty-four dollars’ worth into the Bronco and went inside to pay.

The clerk at the cash register was a woman who had to be at least seventy years old. She was carefully made up and groomed, and her dignified bearing was very much a lady’s, in spite of the store employees’ clownlike uniform of a pink polka-dotted shirt and a bow tie. It seemed odd that she’d be working at all, let alone in a place like this, probably for minimum wage. Skyrocketing living expenses on a fixed income, Monks thought, or maybe a gutted 401K, and this was the only kind of job she could get.

Feeling vaguely guilty, he walked back outside. His path was intersected by a man coming toward him-skinny, with lank shoulder-length hair, jeans and T-shirt that had been worn for days, and several highly visible tattoos.

“Hey, pardner,” he called to Monks. “Me and my friends got a little car trouble. We need a couple bucks for some oil. Could you help us out?” He jerked his head toward a big old sedan pulled up outside the store. Two other men of roughly the same description were leaning against it.

Monks hesitated, then said, “Sure.” He was used to being tapped by street people in San Francisco -it could cost several bucks to get across Union Square at night, paying tolls at every street corner-and when he was there, he carried folded one-dollar bills in his pocket. But here he was unprepared. He pulled out his wallet, extracted two singles, and handed them over.

“How about making it twenty?” the skinny man said, eyeing the other bills inside.

Monks blinked, taken aback. “Sorry. That’s going to have to do it.”

“Come on, man. You got plenty.”

“I’m glad to help within reason,” Monks said. “But I need money, too.” He started to put the wallet back in his pocket.

The man took hold of his wrist with a clawlike grip of surprising strength. He might have been thirty and was certainly not yet forty, but his thin, sallow face was ageless, his eyes burning with dead black fire from another world.

“Are you threatening me?” Monks said in amazement.

“Threat? Don’t insult me, man. I’m asking very politely.” The hand stayed on Monks’s wrist. His buddies who had been leaning against the car were walking closer now.

Monks almost laughed at the sheer outrageousness of this.

“You realize I can go back into that store and have police here in two minutes?” he said.

The skinny man’s mouth tightened, and his eyes drilled into Monks’s for a few more seconds. Then he let go his grip and went back to his car. The other men gave Monks measuring looks before they turned around, too.

He got into the Bronco and drove away, checking his mirror in case they followed. But they were back to leaning against their vehicle-probably waiting for the next mark, who might be more cooperative.

He realized that he was shaken, more so than he should have been. Partly, it was the brazenness of what had almost amounted to robbery, in a public place, in broad daylight. But something else disturbed him more deeply. He had to think for a minute to grasp it, but then it came-the way the skinny man’s mouth had tightened, and that final searing gaze. That was not just anger. It was a look that said, Okay, asshole, if you want to play hardball, that’s how it’s going to be.

The Bronco’s radio was tuned to a Golden Oldies station. Monks usually preferred quiet while he drove, but these past days he’d been keeping up with the news constantly, hoping for the welcome word that Freeboot had been captured.

After a few minutes, he caught an update.

“One of the largest manhunts in California history continues, for a charismatic ex-convict named James Reese, known to his followers as Freeboot,” the news announcer said. “Law-enforcement officials believe that Reese is the mastermind behind the Calamity Jane killings, as well as last week’s riot at Bodega Bay, which left twenty-one dead, including six police officers, with many more injured, and a damage toll in the millions of dollars.

“A San Francisco police car was attacked with gunfire earlier today, while making a drug-related arrest. The shots apparently came from a nearby building, but police were unable to locate a suspect. No one was injured.”

Monks turned the radio off. What the announcer hadn’t mentioned was that there had been two similar incidents during the past days, one in Philadelphia and one in Miami, where police cars had been fired on. The one in Miami had had the aspect of an ambush, with cops lured in on a phony call. An officer was killed and another wounded. There had also been a spate of random shootings in several cities-cars driving around at night, firing into parked vehicles, store windows, even private homes. No one yet had been hurt during those, but if they continued, it was only a matter of time.

In general, there was a sense that whatever mysterious societal force held chaos in check-not just law enforcement, but the awareness that there were lines that couldn’t be crossed-was eroding, fast.

He had been keeping in touch with Pietowski, and so he knew that FBI informants in the fringe world were aware of a sort of verbal underground newspaper that was developing, a word-of-mouth communication that spread through the country with amazing speed. It was urging the stockpiling of weapons and ammunition, attacks on law-enforcement officers, and random violence, especially against the affluent. It also threatened more incidents like Bodega Bay. Authorities admitted that they’d been caught napping, and vowed that nothing like it would happen again. But if thousands of people just started showing up someplace, what could be done? Call out the National Guard? Haul them all off to jail?

What if they started shooting?

Pietowski had hinted that behind the scenes in the political world the alarm was even more acute. The president himself had made a veiled allusion to Bodega Bay at a press conference, repeating his insistence that the United States government would not tolerate terrorism.

But these weren’t terrorists. These were citizens.

Monks turned off Highway 101 at Petaluma, relieved as always to get off the freeway onto two-lane country roads. Traffic thinned as he drove farther west, with the thick canopy of oaks, laurels, redwoods, and eucalyptus groves bringing an early dusk. It started to sink into him how exhausted he was. With all the troubles that still hammered at him, he felt a kind of numb joy at getting back to his own home. The world might be going crazy-crazier-but here, all was serene.

When he stepped inside his house, he was immediately hit by an ugly, fetid smell. It wasn’t one he encountered often, but he never forgot it.

Rotting flesh.

“Just like old times, huh?” Freeboot said from the darkened living room.

Monks had been cautious about his own security at first, but as the days passed, he had decided that the risk of Freeboot’s coming after him were nil, and the FBI had a lot more important people to protect. His gaze swung toward the telephone. It was dead, its lights out.

Taxman stepped into sight, holding a submachine gun at the ready.

Monks felt a dizzying lurch inside his head, and feared that he was having a stroke, that he was going to seize up like a burnt-out engine and collapse to the floor.

Then, just as swiftly, the same euphoria that had come to him after his showdown with Freeboot touched him again-the sudden certainty that nothing more could happen that was worse than what already had.

“If you’re going to shoot me, go ahead and get it over with,” he said. He walked across the kitchen and got a bottle of Finlandia out of the liquor cabinet.

Freeboot made a hoarse hacking sound that seemed to contain amusement.

“Let’s get down to it,” he said. “I ran out of junk. You keep Demerol here, your kid told me.”

“The kid you tried to have killed?” Monks said, dropping ice cubes into a glass. He felt detached, disembodied, almost like he was floating. He noticed that his hands were remarkably steady.

“That was nothing personal, just business.”

“Whose ear was it?”

“Nobody you know. I need a shot-now. So quit fucking around and get it.”

Monks set the ice tray on the counter and said, “All right. Where’s the wound, by the way?”

“How’d you know about that?” Freeboot said suspiciously.

“Are you kidding? I smelled it as soon as I walked in the door.”

“Get the shot.”

Monks walked down the hall to his office, with Taxman following. The phone in there was dead, too. He knelt on the floor and opened the safe where he kept an emergency supply of narcotics, his.357 Magnum, and several thousand dollars in cash.

“All the drugs, and the money,” Taxman said. He pulled the plastic liner bag out of a wastebasket, emptied it on the floor, and tossed it to Monks.

Monks stuffed the bundles of bills inside it, along with an unopened twenty-milliliter vial of hundred-milligram-strength Demerol, a packet of syringes, and a bottle each of Percocets and Vicodin. He waited, expecting Taxman to demand the pistol, too, but he said, “Okay,” and jerked his head back toward the living room. Apparently they had plenty of guns.

When they got there, a light had been turned on. Freeboot was sprawled on the couch, with one leg extended over the coffee table.

At the couch’s other end, huddled into herself, was Marguerite. She looked bewildered, dully frightened, but unhurt.

Another wave of relief washed over Monks.

“Say your little bitch ratted you off,” Freeboot said, pointing a thumb at her. “What would you do with her?”

“She’s carrying your child,” Monk said quickly. “Genetically pure this time.”

“Ain’t that a fucker?” Freeboot said, annoyed. “Confuses the whole issue.”

He took the plastic bag from Taxman. His left arm was already tied up with his belt, popping blood vessels thick as nightcrawlers in his forearm. He held the bottle to the light, examining the label, then unwrapped a syringe and inserted the needle through the vial’s seal. Monks watched him draw out just over one milliliter.

“For a guy who distrusts medicine, you know your dosage,” Monks said.

“This ain’t medicine, man. This is dope.”

Freeboot slid the needle into a vein, and a few seconds later, relaxed and laid his head back with a grunt. The lines of pain eased visibly out of his surgically thickened face.

Now Monks could see the wound-a hand-sized patch of crusted, blackened blood and scab toward the right side of his groin. The bullet must have missed the femoral artery, and the entry point was beneath most of the abdominal organs. But it almost certainly had penetrated the intestines-besides the gangrene, there would be infection, maybe peritonitis-and it might have ricocheted off bone, causing more organ damage.

“If that gets treated immediately,” Monks said, “you might make it. I’m talking hours.”

Freeboot smiled faintly. “The same argument we started with. Kind of like our song. It makes me go all gooey, thinking about it.”

“Let’s try another old song,” Monks said. “‘I hate to say it, but I told you so.’ Remember that one? It was one of those sixties Brit groups.”

He walked back into the kitchen and filled his glass with vodka.

“How about ‘Revolution No. 9’?” Freeboot said.

“A theme song for murder and havoc?”

“The motherfuckers are paying attention, you got to admit.”

Monks took a long sip, savoring what he figured was going to be his last drink.

“It looks to me like a giant step back toward barbarianism,” he said.

“You kick a dog long enough, that dog’s finally gonna bite you. This isn’t over, Rasp. It’s just getting started.”

Freeboot grimaced suddenly, his face contorting in a spasm. The Demerol would provide a little relief, but the agony had to be nearly unendurable. Only unconsciousness was going to keep it at bay now.

Freeboot reached for the bottle again and inserted the needle through the seal. Monks watched with surprise, then alarm, as he drew three milliliters, then five.

“That’s getting up toward lethal,” Monks said.

Freeboot ignored him and filled the syringe to the tenmilliliter mark.

Monks glanced quickly at Taxman and his weapon. Both looked ready.

“Remember one thing, Freeboot,” Monks said. “I had you in my sights and I let you walk away.”

Freeboot looked up at him-not with the stare that Monks was used to, but with weariness, and maybe pity.

“There’s no fucking truth,” Freeboot said. “Everybody’s full of shit, including me. I done what I could, man.”

This time, Monks got the sense that man was intended to include all of humankind.

Freeboot slid the needle into his arm. His thumb pushed the plunger all the way home. Almost immediately, he sagged, forward this time-chin falling onto his chest, right hand dropping to the couch, palm up, fingers slightly curled. The syringe still hung from his left forearm. Marguerite made a whimpering sound, turning her face away and curling more tightly into herself.

Taxman moved without hesitation, stepping forward to pick up the plastic bag of money and drugs.

Monks edged in front of Marguerite. “There’s no reason to hurt her,” he said.

Taxman looked at him curiously, as if Monks was a puzzle he couldn’t get a handle on.

“I watched you playing with the kid that night, making him laugh,” Taxman said. “I never could have done that.”

He flipped the weapon into the air, catching it by the breech in a quick, practiced motion. Then he strode across the room and out into the dusk, breaking into a lope, footsteps crunching lightly on the gravel drive until the sound faded.

Monks leaned down to Marguerite and carefully unclenched her hands with his own, then helped her to her feet.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to a phone and call your mom.”

Arm around her shoulders, he guided her out the door where he had first seen her standing on that night when all this had started, a million years ago.