The Rescue

46

Back in San Diego, they dine in the Gaslamp Quarter at an outdoor table at Mikey’s, heat lamps out against the chill, plenty busy for a blustery night.

Strickland feels proud, sitting across from Bettina Blazak. And happy to be seen with her in public. People here in San Diego don’t stare at her like they do in Laguna. Here she’s just another anonymous beauty. She’s wearing a black knit suit and a silver-and-turquoise squash-blossom necklace, and her hair is up. He can’t believe his luck.

He watches three men approaching on the crowded sidewalk — chinos and bulky leather coats. They’re walking briskly toward the restaurant, hands in their pockets. Nothing unusual about them, but something isn’t right.

They’re two hundred feet away from Strickland, trying for casual, but he reads purpose in their strides. Before leaving for Mammoth, he checked the Jeep for a tracker, and twice more during their journey. But Strickland knows that Palma has allies in Barrio Logan, not far from here.

The three men spread out now, which is when he makes Frank — skinny and golden eyed — last encountered that morning in Laguna, along with Héctor, the morning after the DEA gunned down Joaquín Páez.

Doing the math, Strickland turns a 180 in his restaurant chair, to find the hulking Héctor and two more intent young men coming from the other way, just a hundred feet behind him.

For a total of six gunmen, closing in on him like a vise. Palma has unmasked him, Strickland sees. Sooner than he had figured, much sooner.

He rises. So does Bettina, sensing his alarm, turning in the direction that Strickland was facing when the first wave of urgency came off him.

He turns her and hugs her lightly and whispers in her ear.

“Take Joe through the kitchen and out the back door. If they’re not watching your Jeep, drive it to your parents’ home in Anza Valley. If they’re at the Jeep, walk until you find people and cops. These guys are after me and Joe. Not you.”

“El Gordo’s men?”

“No. Go.”

“I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“You have to. For Joe. He’s trained to defend, Bettina. If he attacks them, they’ll kill him.”

Strickland holds open the restaurant door and watches Bettina and Joe hurry across the lobby and disappear into the dining room.

He draws his weapon from the holster on the small of his back.

“Get down or get out!” he orders, sidling through the sidewalk diners, who lurch and scramble in every direction, one of them knocking down a heat lamp, which sparks and sizzles out. A waiter in a red vest with a tray of food over one shoulder stops mid-step, eyes wide and mouth open.

On the sidewalk, Strickland stays low, zigzagging through a gaggle of pedestrians toward big Héctor and his men. The crowd parts when they see his gun. A woman screams; a man yells, “He’s got a fucking gun!”

A young couple holding hands cuts suddenly into the street, where a gleaming black Corvette skids to miss them as the driver rides the horn.

Strickland is fluid and loose but very clear on acquiring his targets early, like the IPSC pistol shoots he used to dominate. The adrenaline clears his vision and lightens his feet. Fuels his strength and purpose. He feels the danger bowing to him, feels the guidance and protection of his luck.

For Bettina, he thinks.

For Joe.

Strickland feels immortal on this mission — to protect and serve them.

He puts a bullet through Héctor’s forehead and two more each into the chests of his two hapless friends, only one of whom even manages to get his gun up.

No collateral damage, but screams and curses fill the night, the slap of shoes and boots, the skidding and screeching of car tires. The wind blows a palm frond onto the hood of a pickup truck, which rear-ends a sixties hippie van in front of it.

Strickland wheels and reverses through the smell of gun smoke. Feels the strength of his legs, the invincibility in him. Pedestrians part and he sees Frank up ahead with his pistol drawn, taking a knee beneath a stylized Victorian streetlight, using a Gaslamp Quarter trash can for cover.

Bop, bop, bop!

One of the bullets snaps past Strickland’s ear and another twangs off the brick building to his left, and again he zigs and zags toward the fire, dropping Leather Coat I with two shots to his chest, then crabbing farther toward Leather Coat II, feeling the bullets chewing through the air past his head. Strickland dives, rolls, rises, and fires off two head shots at fifty feet. A bony crack, and Leather Coat II collapses. Strickland angles off fast for Frank, who, to Strickland’s satisfaction, is reloading. Strickland has thirteen rounds left and knows it.

He charges Frank, firing — twelve, eleven, ten.

Frank is frowning, a strangely patient expression. He slams home the magazine and points the weapon — bop, bop! — and Strickland feels the horse-kick to his left shoulder.

Fires off nine, eight, and seven. Feels the wet heat on his neck. Doesn’t understand why he’s missing shots he never misses. It’s like damned Frank is too skinny to hit. The cars screech away and the pedestrians bolt and dive for safety and the sirens are screaming in the near distance, sapping Strickland’s concentration.

Still he moves forward.

Focus, he thinks: eyes and feet, eyes and feet, eyes and...

Frank rises from behind the trash can, gun up in both hands. Strickland pulls into a modified Weaver stance for the easy torso shot, the one he has put into the center ring of fifty thousand targets. Squeezes off the round.

The last thing he sees is the orange muzzle flash from Frank’s gun, and the last thing on earth he thinks is:

Bett...

Bettina jams Thunder between the passenger seat and the center console, barrel down. Felix is growling in soft, unrelenting fear of the gunfire, clearly remembering that night at Furniture Calderón.

She reverses out of the pay lot and takes L Street not toward the freeway but back into the fray outside Mikey’s, where she absolutely intends to keep her outgunned Strickland from getting himself killed.

The sirens are howling by now, and with all the Gaslamp one-ways, it takes her forever to get back to Mikey’s, where she sees the crowd gathered on the sidewalk under one of the Victorian-style streetlights.

She parks on the sidewalk, gets the pepper spray gun from the console, locks Thunder and Felix in the Jeep. Then runs toward the people who are lit by the streetlight, their coats and scarves rippling in the wind.

She crashes through the crowd, throwing curses and elbows all the way to the front, where she finds Strickland on his back with his throat half-gone, lying in a swamp of blood that drips into the gutter. She kneels and shakes him as she screams, rocking his beautiful head with her bloody hands and kissing his beautiful face with her bloody lips and this is not how it’s going to end, you people, she thinks, you do not get to kill Dan Strickland, you do not get to kill him, you do not, you do not, you do not...

A boxy ambulance hunches to a stop in a flurry of red lights, and Bettina slogs through the crowd back to the Wrangler, where Felix is in the driver’s seat, staring at Bettina and wagging his tail and still whimpering with fear and confusion as she opens the door and pushes him into the passenger seat. He licks Strickland’s blood from her hand.

It takes her four turns in the Gaslamp one-ways to get back around to the fenced Metro Parking lot she’d left just minutes ago. She takes her old spot, hands trembling, back cold, the terrible metallic smell of Strickland all over her. But she’s got a plan, a good one: these killers had to have followed them here, right? It’s not like they just happened to spot them at Mikey’s. So they know where I parked, right? Right? And they know I’ve got Felix.

Through the passenger-side window, Bettina sees a tall, skinny man in a leather jacket running toward her. He looks like the guy that Strickland recognized first. He ducks under the gate arm on the far side of the Metro Parking lot, and comes slinking through the parked cars toward the Jeep. Bettina hisses at her dog to sit and stay and he instantly obeys.

She lowers both front windows and slides from the Wrangler, drawing the Winchester along with her. Nudges the door shut with her hip.

“Stay,” she whispers. “Stay.”

With her eyes on Skinny, she ducks and backpedals between an SUV and an enormous white Sprinter. Her heart pounds and her hands shiver on Thunder, but she’s got a good view of the driver’s side of her vehicle, and of Felix sitting in the passenger seat, and of the man still coming across the lot toward them.

He stops ten feet short of the driver’s-side window, his back to Bettina. She sees the gun jammed into his waistband, the grip outside his short leather jacket.

“Hello, Joe,” he says.

She can see Felix, staring at the skinny gunman.

Bettina steps from her lair and into the yellow security lights of the parking lot, racking the 12-gauge.

Skinny flinches.

“If you go for that gun, I’ll blow you in half,” she says. The pounding in her ears is so loud she knows he must hear it. So she says it again, louder.

The man raises his hands. “I don’t have a gun.”

“It’s under your jacket.”

“Are you Bettina Blazak?”

“I am her. Turn to me but keep your hands up!”

A lined face and a drooping mustache. His eyes are yellow gold and his face betrays no emotion. A face made in prison, she thinks.

“I saw what you did to Dan.”

“He deserved his punishment.”

“Who ordered it?”

“The Jalisco New Generation Cartel.”

She spreads her feet and clamps the 12-gauge tighter to her shoulder.

“Why?”

“He worked for them and betrayed them.”

“Worked?”

“An arrangement.”

Through the roaring in her ears, she hears Strickland’s words that day in Alta Laguna Park: I’ll do anything to protect you and Joe.

“Are you here to kill my dog too?”

“Yes. The order comes from Carlos Palma himself. His word is the law.”

“I won’t let you. I’ll shoot you before you do that. I can get the cops here in less than a minute. They’re all over the Gaslamp and my phone is in my pocket.”

Listening to her own brittle, adrenaline-charged voice, Bettina believes almost nothing she has just said.

“But you don’t want me dead or in prison,” says Skinny. “If I don’t convince Palma that Joe is dead, he’ll send others to finish the job. And if they fail, he will send more. There’s no end to men with guns, Ms. Blazak. Joe will certainly die. I can’t save him if I’m in prison. Or a grave.”

Skinny’s logic is as dark as it is true.

“How do you convince your boss?”

“I am his son-in-law. And I am not only a fine sicario, I run the New Generation’s business with La Eme — the Mexican Mafia.”

“Why should I believe you’ll lie for Felix?”

“Not just for your dog, Ms. Blazak — I would be lying for me and you.”

“Why?”

“To keep my life and my freedom. My wife and children. My Javier is a soccer star and only twelve. I would be happy to let Joe live. He is cute. You rescued him and I like your videos. And to be honest, you have to let me go or the dog will be hunted down. I always liked him. Isn’t that right, Joe?”

Bettina lowers the shotgun from Skinny’s face to his chest. Past his shoulder she sees Felix, his funny ears alert, his expression intensely focused on the man just a few feet beyond her open window, so easily jumpable. She knows that the Fass! command will launch him like a rocket. Felix could take Skinny by the neck, all fang and jaw, like a hound from the underworld. But Skinny might just be fast enough to draw his gun and fire.

“You killed a man who loved and protected me. I will not let you go.”

“You have to. My freedom for Joe’s life. I can’t bring — I’m sorry you lost a boyfriend. But maybe you’re better off without a violent criminal in your life. Go find someone better.”

Bettina’s cold body has warmed; her trembling fingers and leaden legs feel strong and ready. No roaring in her ears now, just the steady rhythm of blood. Spark to flame to fire.

She will do what needs to be done.

“What’s your name?”

“Frank.”

“Drop the gun, Frank.”

He sets it quietly on the asphalt.

“Now both hands up, Frank. Walk away slowly and Felix won’t attack you. I’m tracking you with my gun until you’re out of sight. Don’t test me. I’ve hit a million clay targets a lot smaller than your head.”

“I’ll never get out of here with all these cops. My car’s way down on Sixth. Give me a ride to Barrio Logan.”

Bettina stands in the fire, the stubborn conviction that she’s about to triumph. Feels capable and fated. She’s clear on what she has to do.

“Kick the gun to me.”

He does. Bettina keeps Thunder pointed at Skinny’s chest as she picks up his pistol by the barrel end and drops it into her suit coat pocket.

“You drive and I’ll keep your gun aimed at your kneecap,” she says. “I’ll take it home to match the cartridges you used on Dan tonight. Should that be required in court. Which it will be, if any more killers like you show up for my dog.”

“You got some brains, niña. We could use you.”

“Stay away from me at all costs.”

As Bettina wends her way from Barrio Logan to Highway 163, Felix sits next to her, bolt upright, nose to the window crack, whining.

Where is Dan?

Who was that bad man?

Why does Bettina smell like bloody meat?

Where is Dan?

The sound of gunfire on the Gaslamp streets has brought him back to Furniture Calderón and the hot, thudding pain in his leg. He curls into the seat and starts licking the scar.

Thinks of Dan in warehouse, still doesn’t understand why Dan left him there under that car.

Thinks of the boy holding him tight and how his leg hurt and the blood tasted, like Bettina’s hand, and how the Good Man shaved part of his fur and stuck something in his leg.

Remembered the cold stone Crate that was his, and all the smells of Tijuana flooding through him as he lay there day after day. Sad, and wanting Teddy and Dan, even Aaron.

He stops licking and looks up at Bettina, who looks at him with an expression so sad that Felix looks away.

But he knows she will not leave him.

Would never leave him.

Team.