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.