A telephone truck was backed up to a junction box across the street at
the pizza place.
There were also joggers, dog walkers, women pushing baby carriages,
bicyclists, and little old ladies in tennis shoes strolling to the
stores for their daily mall walks.
Ventura figured that any or all of them could be other than what they
seemed. Probably some of them were legit, but he couldn't make that
assumption about any particular one--that kind of thinking got you
killed. That old lady might be a kung fu expert; and instead of little
Mac, that baby carriage might hold little Mac-10. If you were prepared
for the worst, then anything less was a gift.
He smiled as he headed back toward the theater. He liked films, but he
had always found those movies hilarious where the bad-guy kidnappers or
extortionists showed up to collect their money and never looked twice
at the wino on the park bench, or the young couple holding hands, or
the priest feeding the pigeons, all of whom might as well have had big
flashing neon signs on them saying 'Cop!' Crooks who were that stupid
deserved to get shot--it was good for the gene pool.
Of course, good people were always hard to find, in most any line of
work. Ventura himself had only a dozen pros he'd personally let watch
his back when the bullets started to fly, and it had taken twenty-odd
years to find that many he trusted. They all worked for him on and
off.
There were another twenty or thirty second-tier shooters who could do
things like the theater setup today, who would follow instructions and
hit their marks if push came to shoot. Past that? Well, most of the
people he'd met who played at being soldiers of fortune or freelance
bodyguards or hitters were okay at best, coffin fodder at worst.
He figured the Chinese would send the sharpest they could round up on
short notice to play here today, but how many they could get inside was
tricky. Too few and they wouldn't feel covered properly; too many, and
it would alert anybody half-awake. If he had to trade places with
Chilly Wu, he'd be a little concerned about that.
Morrison stood by the concession stand, nervously sucking on a straw
stuck in a cup of tizzy orange drink.
He's going to ask me if everything is okay, Ventura thought.
'Everything okay?'
Ventura smiled.
'Under control.'
'I'm worried about this screenwriter business,' Morrison said.
'Aren't you concerned that the Chinese might know about it, slip some
ringers in?'
'Not really. The op in the ticket booth is checking membership cards.
He'll scan those into our systems. I have a man in the manager's
office with links to the WGA database. He'll match the names on the
cards against a list of members, and the faces on the closed-circuit
se E
circuit security cam in the booth against those in the guild's
database--those are new, the pictures--and also against California
