One of the LAPD black-armored wraiths swiveled at the sound of Cruncher hitting the pavement and spoke into his helmet mike. The three other cops also then swiveled Coyne’s way, their movements smooth and oily as those of robots in a sci-fi movie, and visors snicked down as the cops magnified the scene.
Grinning broadly, Coyne showed empty palms in the cops’ direction and then offered his hand to help Cruncher up. Val started laughing stupidly as if it were all just play and a few of the smarter guys in the gang followed suit. Cruncher got up, scowling, his lower lip thrust out like a sulking four-year-old’s, and Coyne led the way to the nearest down-ladder, his arm around the fat boy. Just a bunch of dumbshit homies on their early-morning adventure out to the grown-ups’ market.
Three blocks away and in the musty-smelling darkness under an angled, low-hanging, block-long tumbled slab of the 10 and safely out of sight or mike-range of any interested thing aerial or on foot, Coyne hit Cruncher again, this time full in the mouth.
Val heard teeth snap off and watched coldly as the heavy, stupid fat boy went down again.
“You stupid fuck,” snarled Coyne, standing astride the fallen Cruncher. “You fucking stupid cunt-stupid fuck. Do you think this is a fucking game? Don’t you know that you can get us all killed? Dropped in the ass-fucking Dodger Stadium DHSDC hole for the rest of our fucking lives? Do you want to be manpussy for spanic and nigger humpbugger killers for the rest of your fucking life?”
Coyne twirled, fists still clenched and face still distorted into a snarling mask, to face the others—to face everyone, Val knew, except Val—and screamed, “Do you, you pansyassed motherfuckers? You want to get yourself picked up by DHS and tortured or just offed, fucking do it! But don’t do it to me, goddamn you, or I’ll do it to you first, you fuckheads!”
Suddenly the Beretta was in Coyne’s right hand. Thinking about it later, Val still couldn’t see him reaching back for it, making the motion toward it. One second Coyne’s hand was a fist and in the next second—the black muzzle-circle of death was moving, aiming at all of them one after the other.
Everybody except Val was babbling an apology, was swearing he wouldn’t fuck up, was saying he’d never say anything where anyone could hear it. Even Cruncher was spewing apologies along with shards of his broken teeth and gobbets of blood from his pulped lips.
Everyone was talking except Val.
Coyne aimed the Beretta—Val’s Beretta it was supposed to be—straight at Val’s face. “Do you understand, shitstain? Are you going to keep your mouth shut?”
Hurt, Val could only blink and nod. He felt a strange sensation with the gun aimed at him—a crawling around his scrotum, as if his testicles wanted to crawl back up inside his body, and a sudden urge to hide behind someone, anyone, even himself.
Val heard himself say, “You haven’t told us how and where we can kill a Jap yet.”
Coyne smiled, slid the gun under his now attentive and grimly smiling Putin shirt, and nodded in return. He gestured everyone into a crouching circle. Even Cruncher struggled to his knees to join.
“Not a Jap,” whispered Coyne. “The Jap. Daichi Omura himself. The California Advisor.”
Some of the boys whistled. Cruncher tried to but just winced and touched his ruined lips and broken teeth with tentative fingers.
“Shut up,” Coyne said. Everyone shut up.
“This Friday evening, they’re having a big city thing rededicating the Disney Performing Arts Center down on Grand Avenue in the city center. The spanic mayor and everyone’ll be there, but no one but the top guys and us knows that Advisor Omura’s showing up, coming down from the Green Zone and Getty Castle in a motorcade. I know right when he’ll arrive—to the second—and where the armored limo will pull up and which side Omura will get out of the car on and where the bodyguards will be.”
“But how could…,” squeaked Dinjin and was slapped into silence by Toohey or one of the others.
Val, still blushing with anger and embarrassment, understood. Coyne had so much money because his divorced mother worked for the city—worked as liaison for the Advisor’s office and the city. Worked in the transportation department.
“And we’ll be there waiting,” said Coyne. Looking from face to face.
Gene D. was shaking his head. “I’ve seen that sorta thing on TV, B.C. And no disrespect or nothing, but… I mean… like… we ain’t going to get within ten blocks of that Performing Arts place and whatever’s goin’ on inside. Especially if the Advisor’s going to be there. It’d be like a pope visiting and…”
“They killed a pope not long ago,” interrupted Coyne.
Gene D. nodded, shook his head, found his strand again. “No, I mean… you know… there’s going to be state troopers and whatchamacallims… the federal guys…”
“Homeland,” said a sullen Sully.
“Yeah, but no,” said Gene D., “that’s not who I mean. Those other federal guys…”
“The State Department Office of Security,” said Coyne, showing everyone how patient he was being.
“Yeah. And not only them but the Jap protection guys as well…,” said Gene D. and sort of wound down. It was a pretty impressive showing by a not very impressive kid, thought Val.
When Val spoke, he was amazed how normal—even solid—his voice sounded, given that he’d almost pissed himself a minute or so earlier when Coyne had pointed the Beretta at him.
“What Gene D.’s saying,” said Val, “is that we couldn’t get close, and even if we did get close, we couldn’t kill Omura without getting gunned down by his security, and even if we did somehow get close and kill the Advisor and not get killed ourselves, we’d never get away. The whole city would go apeshit. They’d have our faces on every sat channel before we got half a block away… which we wouldn’t get anyway.”
Val heard how lame that finish had been, but he left it that way and crossed his arms.
Coyne smiled. “You’re absolutely right, my man. Except for one thing. Sewers. I know the sewers and how to get there and where to wait and which one to shoot from and which ones to get away in.”
Toohey made a scrunchy face. “Forget it, man. I ain’t crawling through shit to kill no one.”
Coyne rolled his eyes. “Not shit-sewers, stupid. Storm sewers. Rain runoff sewers. The city’s riddled with them.”
Val again remembered the 1954 movie Them about the giant ants and the finale where FBI guy James Arness and his sidekick, whatshisname, chased down the ants in the storm sewers that ran into the usually dry Los Angeles River with army Jeeps and big trucks roaring down the echoing underground corridors. Val’s old man had loved that movie for some stupid reason—probably because Val’s mother also loved it—and when Val was little, he’d loved watching the idiot black-and-white flatfilm with both his parents, the little room in the little house smelling of popcorn and the sprung old couch crowded…
He came up out of it—the memory had been almost as compelling as a flash, but only because he had flashed on those experiences so many times with the drug—and said, “No, Coyne. No. It’s not like the city and Jap security people don’t also know about those sewers. When someone like the Advisor goes somewhere public, I’ve read where they weld the sewer openings closed for a mile or so around…” Val could see Coyne grinning but he went ahead anyway. “Not just the round manhole-type sewer-sewers that Toohey was talking about, but storm sewer openings, too. Weld them shut or seal them up somehow.”