The Triggerman Dance

He sped into Santa Ana and dropped down toward a darkened, tree-lined street, then used the spotlight to beam a rather quaint, yellow house. "Two months ago, at a party in that house, the gangs went at it. Three dead—one of them a boy of eleven. Turns out the boy was the third brother in a family that had already lost the other two to gang wars. Now the mother lives alone in that yellow house. Husband ran out two years ago. Mexicans."

He sped to Fullerton and hovered over the back yard of a handsome suburban home, illuminating the grass with the spotlight. "Three high school boys murdered their friend right down there—beat him to death with shovels and suffocated him. Poured bleach down his throat. They buried him about a foot down. The ringleader blamed it on Camus' The Stranger, which he'd read not long before the murder. Chinese."

He sped over Westminster, lowered the chopper over Bolsa and followed the lights of Little Saigon down the avenue. "Down there at the newspaper office they set an editor on fire because they didn't like his politics. Across the street, at the noodle shop, two girls died in a shootout between rival home invaders. Right down there, at the corner where the light's red, an elderly man was beaten to death one evening, but nothing was taken from him. Politics again. That's the name of the game down there in Little Saigon. They're different than us, John. Vietnamese."

He sped south again, staying low into Mission Viejo. "Down on one of those little streets—they all look the same to me—was where the Nightstalker took two of his victims. Raped the woman, shot the man in the head. Ramirez—a Mexican."

Then south and west to San Clemente, hovering near the pier, spotlighting a narrow road leading down to a parking lot. "That's where a tough Mex gang speared a seventeen-year old surfer in the head with a sharpened paint roller. He died in the hospital a little while later."

Holt ran the spotlight across the cars in the lot, looking down from the port window of the Hughes. "I find these places from newspaper articles. I come out to the ones I feel might have resonance for me. Because when you get right down to them, when you put your feet on the ground where these things happened, you understand how ordinary it is. They don't happen in cursed places. They don't happen in certain parts of the country where you expect it. When you stand down in that parking lot and look around you—like I have a half dozen times—you see that things like this can happen anywhere. It's in the fabric now. As I told you before, these interlopers don't understand the value of where they are. They should not be here. But this is our country, our world. My years at the Bureau did nothing to change it—in fact, it got worse. But I refuse to go through my life up on Liberty Ridge and ignore it. I'm not immune. Patrick and Carolyn proved that to me. They're all around us now, John. The killers and the fools, the rapists and the morons, the vicious, the stupid, the ignorant and the murderous, the desperate and the furious. This is our context now. And that is why I started Liberty Operations. I'm trying to stanch the fear. Make people feel safe from each other. Give people the freedom of security. When a family buys protection from Liberty Operations, they get protection. They get consultation on home alarm systems, safes, firearms defense if they want it, tear gas certification, manual self-defense. They get threat assessment. They get mirrors to check their cars for bombs, scanners to check their mail. They can get training for their dogs. They can get scramblers and tape recorders for their phones. They can get training to use any self-defense gadget on earth, and the gadget, too. They get armed response from the Holt Men. They get follow-up investigations if the cops don't make an arrest. They get preemptive action, preventive strikes, protective aggression. They can even get extra-legal satisfaction, once known as vengeance, John. Expensive, but I provide it. They get two-thousand strong, healthy, capable Holt Men on the streets twenty-four hours of every day. Men who observe. Men who protect. Men who are on their side. Holt Men. The new centurions. Guardians of freedom. Best men in the world." Holt spun the chopper back around to the north and accelerated through the darkness. He was thankful again that the Hughes was strong as ever, because he was not. Fading, he thought, but not faded; going but not gone. The orange and black machine supplied the strength that was draining from his body every hour of every day.

Rage on.

"Reach behind you," he said.

John found the bundle and unwrapped it on his lap.

"Put the vest on under your coat. Don't fire that forty-five unless it's to save your life."

Holt smiled at John's puzzled look.

"Let's go to work," he said.

chapter 31