With a handgun and a ski mask over its face — the gun silenced and the ski mask red.
Gale jumps out, nudges the door closed, draws his sidearm.
Ski Mask sidles into the garage behind Vern, who now turns and pulls off his right glove, reaching for the revolver holstered low on his leg like a gunslinger’s.
Even from here Gale sees his big face and wide eyes, blanched by the fluorescent lights overhead.
Daniela closes fast, from up the street.
Gale, too, yelling, “Freeze!”
Stops at a hundred feet and takes a Weaver stance.
Vern looks at him but Ski Mask does not; instead, he points his handgun at Vern, unsteadily, barrel wobbling like he’s going to drop it.
“Drop the gun and down!” yells Daniela. “Drop and DOWN!”
Ski Mask spits a round into Jeffs.
Gale shoots twice, moves in as Ski Mask drops to his knees, and Daniela puts three more bullets into him.
Gunsmoke hangs in the jittery fluorescence, metallic and strong.
Beyond his sights, Gale watches Ski Mask, on his back now, arms out and gun fallen from his right hand, chest rising and falling.
Gale hears his gasps, catches a glimpse of Mendez out in the perimeter of the garage lights.
Vern, huge and motionless, lies on his back beside his gleaming black Harley.
Mindy bursts from the house into the garage in a baby blue robe, sees Vern and screams, throwing herself on her husband.
Mendez stands over Ski Mask in his widening blood, his chest no longer rising and falling, his stillness absolute.
She squats and pulls off the mask to reveal Kevin Elder’s handsome face, his aquiline nose and the streak of gray in his widow’s peak.
His eyes mostly pupils.
Mendez looks at Gale with dull surprise.
A gray Rivian pickup truck comes slowly toward them on Yorktown, hesitates near the driveway, then U-turns and speeds away.
Their shots puncture the eerie silence, and the Rivian’s rear tires burst, and the sleek machine veers suddenly, jumps the curb, and runs through the oil pumper fence, bashing to a stop against the great arm of the thing, which is still rising and falling when the truck’s lithium battery catches fire and the flames ripple up through the seams of the hood.
Grant Hudson throws open the door, sees the fence surrounding him, then turns and faces the detectives, hands up.
Gale squeezes through the pierced chain link as Mendez covers him and Mindy wails beyond the fog.
“My favorite detective!” says Grant Hudson. “I have broken no laws and will not talk without a lawyer.”
“On the ground, cockroach. Face down.”
“It was all Kevin and Hal Teller. I was just following orders. Swear to God.”
“Hands together,” says Gale, cinching the tie snugly, then yanking him to his feet.
Back to the garage behind Mendez, pushing Hudson along in front of him, Gale sees that Mindy is still sprawled over Vern, but now silent.
She rolls off him and plops cross-legged on the bloody concrete, her nightgown soaked with blood.
Looks with dazed eyes at the players surrounding her, settling on Mendez.
“You people don’t know shit,” Mindy says.
“Tell us what we don’t know,” says Mendez.
“We needed the money for the cancer. These pukes hired Vern, then turned on him when he started talking to you two. When you found the crystal cavern, they wanted you both dead. Vern said fuck that — Gale’s okay, a jarhead sniper like me.”
“Vern got Tarlow out to Caspers for the owl,” says Gale.
“The great gray owl,” says Mindy. “They’re sacred. They don’t exist here.”
Gale holsters his gun, orders Grant Hudson to sit and stay, watches Mindy Jeffs contemplating the blood on her blue robe.
Mendez stares down, first at Vernon Jeffs, then at Kevin Elder, in their mingled pools of blood, with an air of dazed wonder.
The neighbors have gathered on the sidewalk across the street. Gale sees robes and flannels, long tees and shearling boots and cell screens held high, aglow in the night.
41
Just hours later, at first light in her humble Tustin home, Daniela showers off the dried sweat and blood, puts on jeans and her OC Sheriff’s windbreaker for the October chill, and looks in on her sleeping son again.
Look at him, she thinks. Just look.
She takes a mug of coffee to the table in her small living room, watches the local news. Nothing about the fatal shootout in Huntington Beach yet, but two men with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood have been arrested for the murder of three Laotians out in the mountains near Wildcoast.
People with guns, thinks Mendez.
Fuck them all, but not us. Defund us not.
She’s too weary to sleep, her mind scrolling through the last hours over and over but in random order:
Grant Hudson’s Rivian crashing into the oil pump.
Fog and gunsmoke.
OCSD Internal Affairs Form 1-C Deputy-Involved Shootings.
Mindy’s blood-smeared robe.
The suppressed bullet tearing through the heart of large Vernon Jeffs.
That smacking sound.
Kevin Elder’s blue eyes and his gray widow’s peak.
The jump of her pistol in her hands and the flicker of blood in the fluorescent lights as her and Gale’s bullets went through him.
We needed the money for the cancer... these pukes hired Vern...
Wiping the blood off the soles of her Adidas on the thin brown lawn of the Jeffs’s front yard.
“Morning, Mom.”
“Jesse. You’re up early.”
“School. Remember?”
“Sit down. I want to talk to you.”
Jesse gets a cup of coffee, loads it with creamer, and sits across from his mother. He’s in his black-and-white flannel PJs, his shiny scalp recently shaven, his eyes fastened on hers.
“I know about the drone,” she says. “I know about you and Bishop Buendia. I know you and Lulu have been running with Barrio Dogtown and I know from the counselor you’ve been cutting most of the few classes you have.”
“How do you think you know all this?”
“Friends. People at work. Buendia’s under surveillance by the gang squad, and you came up. Lunch at El Jardin. Drones and phones at El Salvador Park. You were observed to be a talented pilot.”
Jesse blushes with what Daniela can only surmise is pride. “Your friends are all cops, Mom.”
“A cop is what I am, Jesse. And your friends are all gangsters and wannabes. Such as yourself.”
He swallows, his Adam’s apple thickly bobbing.
“Well, about all that,” he says. “So what?”
“What does Buendia want you to do with them, the drones and phones?”
“They’re for rescue work in disaster zones. One of the things the bishop’s Camp Refuge does is disaster relief in California. You know, like wildfires and floods and the fentanyl epidemic.”
“So you shoot video and pictures from the sky?”
A smile and a nod. “Absolutely we will. The phones and drones are donated.”
“Not stolen?”
“See, Mom? You imagine the worst in me, so that’s what you see. All you can see. We’ll be delivering food and survival blankets — the lightweight, silver ones.”
“I see a lot of good in you, Jesse,” says Mendez. “Intelligence. Light. Bigheartedness. Love.”
“You hate Lulu.”
“I hate what she wants you to become.”
“You don’t know anything about her or what we want together. Do you want me to move out?”
Daniela chokes back the painful lump in her throat. “Absolutely I do not. I love you more than life, Jesse, and I want you to be here as long as you want to be.”