Flashback

Coyne reached under his T-shirt in back and pulled something from the waistband of his jeans.

“Holy shit!” shouted little Dinjin. “A gun.”

It was indeed. All seven boys gathered around Coyne where he squatted at the edge of the pigeon-splattered ledge.

“M-nine Beretta nine millimeter,” whispered Coyne to the huddled circle of heads above him. “Safety’s here…” He pushed a little lever backward and forward. Val guessed that the red dot meant “safety off.”

“Magazine release is here…” Coyne pushed a little button on the stock behind the trigger guard. The clip or magazine or whatever the hell it should be called slid out and Coyne caught it in his free hand. “Holds fifteen rounds. Can fire one in the chamber with the magazine out.”

“Can I hold it? Can I? Can I?” breathed Sully. “Please. I’ll just, you know, whatchamacallit, dry-fire it.”

“Is that like dry-humping a girl?” asked Monk.

“Shaddup,” said Val, Coyne, Sully, and Gene D. together. They didn’t like it when a junior member spoke out of turn.

Coyne held the magazineless semiauto up and pointed the muzzle at Sully. “I’ll give it to you if you know how to handle it. Can it shoot now?”

“Naww,” laughed Sully. “The clip’s…”

“Magazine,” said Coyne.

“Right, yeah. The magazine’s out. I can see the bullets packed in the… magazine. Gun’s safe.”

Val could see the bullets, too, or at least the top one in the magazine: brass-wrapped, lead-nosed, notched at the top as if cut with a penknife. It made him feel weird, stirred him the same way the roar of the Harley-Davidson motorcycles had.

“You’re a moron,” Coyne said to Sully. “Coulda killed yourself or me or any of these other rat-twats panting here.” Coyne racked the slide back on the old gun and a bullet that had been in the chamber arced up and out. The leader caught that round, slug, cartridge, bullet—whatever you should call it—in his free hand.

“There was one in the pipe,” Coyne said softly. “You would have blown your own dick off. Or killed one of us.”

Sully grinned and blinked rapidly, admonished but obviously still so eager to hold the weapon that he forgot to act pissed at being rebuked.

The fuckhead probably would have shot one of us, thought Val.

Coyne moved the butterfly safety so the red dot was covered up, pulled the trigger so that the slide slammed forward again, and handed the semiautomatic pistol to Sully, his oldest friend and first disciple. The other guys crowded closer to Sully as Coyne and Val stepped back three paces.

Val had turned to look out at the city.

To his southeast was downtown with what was left of its towers, including the stump of the U.S. Bank Tower—what old farts like his grandfather still called the Library Tower—and the vertical rubble of the Aon Center. Most of the other remaining towers were largely abandoned and wearing their black antiterrorist condoms.

But Val wasn’t looking at old buildings.

He saw Los Angeles, as everyone did now, as sections of owned and protected turf, almost as if the different areas he could see were pulsing in different colors. To his south and east was spanic turf, mostly reconquista. Straight south across the empty canyons of downtown were strongholds of nigger and chink turf with even more reconquista areas surrounding them. Behind Val, to the north, were serious chink, dink, and slope neighborhoods but all slowly giving way to the reconquista expansion, while farther west and north, especially up in the hills, the anglos had turned Mulholland Drive into a private road and protected the high ground not only with gates but with militia and electric fences. The Jap Green Zone was way west off the 405, up in the hills where the Getty Center museum used to be and surrounded by moats, electrified fences, security patrols, and MUAV kill zones. There were a hundred other less important—but rabidly defended—turfs in L.A. these days, and every goddamned one of them, Val knew, had its own checkpoints, roadblocks, and killing zones.

The rich-shit areas of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, and parts of Santa Monica were where the real nighttime fun was these days, but Val’s grandfather didn’t have a car Val could steal, so he didn’t try to go there. The gang wouldn’t get into those gated and security-guarded richshit communities anyway. Coyne’s pathetic little flashgang was on foot, so the Pacific Ocean was as unreachable as the moon.

“Want to hold it?” Coyne asked Val.

Coyne had been going around the circle holding out the Beretta semiautomatic like a priest offering the Communion wafer and now it was Val’s turn.

Val took the pistol. He was surprised at how heavy it felt—even with the magazine out and still in Coyne’s hand—and the crosshatched butt or handle or whatever you called it felt cool in Val’s sweaty hand. Acting as if he knew what the fuck he was doing, Val racked the slide back and looked into the empty chamber.