Flashback

hospital—Coyne had carefully cut through the padlock chain so that the cut shouldn’t be noticed—and all their guns would be tossed there. They’d wear gloves during the shooting.

The I-10 Open Air Market hajji who’d sold them the weapons kept no records.

“We’ll all be in our own homes watching the replay on CNN before the cops and Jap security guys pull their thumbs out of their asses,” said Coyne.

“What if some of us get wounded or killed?” asked Val. “Then it’s just a matter of time before the cops and FBI find the names of the rest of us in the flashgang.”

Coyne had scowled furiously at Val. “Nobody’s gonna get wounded or killed, ty mudak.”

Val’s phone later told him that the Russian meant, roughly, “you asshole.”

The leering face of Vladimir Putin also scowled at Val but seemed to be speaking to Coyne. “Eto trus, yavlyaet—sya slabym zvenom v tsepochke, malen kii Koi n. Vy dolzhny ubit yego.”

Val hadn’t used his phone to translate that. He got the general idea and knew that the Putin T-shirt would love to see him dead.

Coyne had come over and put his arm around Val, gesturing the others closer until it had turned into a goddamned group hug. “Nobody’s gonna get wounded or dead, Val my droogy pal,” Coyne said confidently. “This is a lark. We’re gonna flash on this for the rest of our lives.”

“As long as the rest of our lives isn’t counted in minutes,” muttered Val.

Coyne had laughed and punched Val in the upper arm. “No guts, no glory. You wanna be like the rest of the walking dead up there in the world?”

“No,” said Val after a few seconds of thought. “I don’t.”

Val spent the week trying to figure out what to do. He was neither an idiot—as Dinjin, Toohey, Cruncher, Sully, Monk, and Gene D. increasingly seemed to be—or crazy as a shithouse rat, which he was all but sure Billy Coyne was. Shooting at a Nipponese Federal Advisor these days was as serious (and probably more serious) than shooting at the president of the United States. The FBI and Homeland Security would become involved immediately and Val had no doubt that the nine Advisors’ security people had their own investigative resources around the whole country.

Even the hardcores like Aryan Brotherhood and al Qaeda–America knew better than to try to kill a Japanese Advisor.

Val knew that something was behind Coyne’s certainty—nuts or not—and he poked around on the Internet with his phone computer for three days before he found it on a city-Advisor liaison bulletin board site: Ms. Galina Kschessinska—formerly Mrs. Galina Coyne, according to archived bulletins going back six years—a much-lauded executive assistant in charge of liaison between the City of Los Angeles Transportation Department and the office of Federal Advisor Daichi Omura for the past nine years, was taking early retirement so that she could return to Moscow to be with her extended family. Friday, September 17, was her last day and she planned to leave for Moscow on Saturday the eighteenth. Ms. Kschessinska would be taking her sixteen-year-old son with her. Plans for a return to the U.S. were indefinite. “I just want to see my family—get reacquainted,” Ms. Kschessinska told the Transportation Department’s bulletin reporter, “and then, of course, we’ll be coming back so my son can fulfill his Selective Service obligation.”

Val almost giggled as he read this. Billy Coyne was as crazy as a shithouse rat, all right, but not quite as self-destructive-crazy as Val had thought. Mommy and little Billy wouldn’t be coming back from Russia.

Billy’s mother must have tried to buy her second son’s way out of the draft the way she’d bought his older brother, Brad’s, freedom, but evidently that hadn’t worked this time. Coyne had bragged to Val many a time that Brad was already in Russia and rising quickly in the mafia there. And neither Coyne nor his mother had any intention of Billy getting drafted into the United States Army and dying fighting for India or Japan in rural China.

So old Coyne had a built-in, mommy-driven getaway waiting the morning after his gang’s kamikaze attack on Advisor Omura. Val wondered if Coyne would even show up at the Friday-evening assassination attempt.

He thought he probably would. As much fun as sending his seven compadres off to almost certain death—or at least future captivity—might seem to shithouse rat Billy the C, taking part in it and then getting away scot-free (Russia had no extradition treaty with the United States) must appeal to him more. Coyne was a sociopath and a flash addict and Val thought that the allure of Billy the C’s flashing on Omura’s murder—probably as incentive to even bigger and better escapades in Mother Russia—must be compelling.

So Coyne will probably be there Friday night, thought Val. But will I?

For four days of that workweek leading up to what he was already thinking of as the Friday Night Massacre, But will I? was the operative question for Val.

That had been his central question, in a slightly different form, for some months now. Val Bottom… or Val Fox, as he preferredto be known in his run-down, chaotic Los Angeles high school… had been depressed enough to consider suicide.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Except that some late literary guy named Harold Bloom, whom Val had looked up on his own due to his interest in Hamlet, said that the “To be or not to be…” soliloquy wasn’t debating suicide after all. That fact would be a big surprise to Mr. Herrendet, his junior English teacher, who taught Hamlet but obviously had never really read it.

Up to now, Val’s thoughts of self-destruction had been fairly unserious because all the means to it available to him—jumping off high places, hanging, stealing enough sleeping pills to do it, stealing a car or motorcycle and putting it into an overpass column at ninety miles per hour—had been so off-putting that his consciousness shied away from any planning involving such solutions to his melancholy.

But now he had the 9mm Beretta.

Coyne had given him the gun on Monday, after the leader had purchased his own OAO Izhmash flechette- spewer at the midnight market. It was the kind of modern automatic weapon that the grinning hajjis called a synagogue sweeper, and Coyne was delighted with it despite the fact that being caught with it meant a no-plea-bargain minimum hard eight years in Dodger Stadium.

That night Val had downloaded and printed out a step-by-step “How to Love and Care for Your 9mm Beretta” and had purchased the proper oil, found the correct sort of clean rags and cleaning rods, and spent his free time cleaning, inspecting, and learning about the semiautomatic. He’d removed the magazine, checked to make sure there was no round in the chamber, and set the muzzle against his forehead.

Another online piece of advice (he did not download this one), titled “Suicide Is Your Unalienable Right: How to Do It,” told Val that even a large-caliber bullet like a 9mm was not always guaranteed to penetrate the thick bone of the skull. Even the slightest deflection, said the helpful article, turned a suicide bullet into a ticket for years of being a drooling vegetable.

The only certainty, went the online advice, was to set the pistol’s muzzle against the soft palate in the roof of your mouth. That was guaranteed to put a bullet into your brain, ending all pain and doubt.

Val tried it but the heavy taste of gun oil and the bulk of the blocky 9mm pistol’s squarish barrel filling his mouth made him retch until he vomited. The act also felt faggy as hell.

What other options?

Suicide by cop, of course. Just get in front of the mob of demented children at the storm sewer opening on Friday night and take a few rounds for the flashgang.

But would that guarantee a quick and relatively painful death? Probably, but not definitely.

When he was eight or nine, Val had watched an old movie from the last century called The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid with the Old Man, who loved old cowboy movies. In the movie, a really slimy Jesse James and his brother Frank, joined by a bunch of other brother-outlaws, including Cole Younger and his brother, tried to knock over an “easy bank” in Northfield, Minnesota. Evidently Northfield didn’t like having its easy bank robbed since—in the movie, at least—every man, boy, and dog in the little town grabbed a shotgun or rifle and shot the outlaws to bits.

Cole Younger, already hit five times in Northfield, was shot several more times during a gunfight in a swamp,