A crew member buttoned up the hatch behind him as Nick stepped into a luxuriously appointed cabin just aft of the flight deck. The swiveling leather seats at the windows, deep-cushioned couches, and 3DHD flatscreens on the bulkheads would have been at home in a billionaire’s executive jet, but this space was larger.
Sato was seated and buckled in at one of the starboard leather seats that had a low table in front of it. He did not rise as Nick entered but gestured to the chair opposite him.
Nick settled gingerly into the full-grain leather seat and buckled his seat belt. Cabin lights dimmed as the A310/360 returned to the head of the runway and tested its engines again at full throttle. The pilot said something over the intercom in Japanese and the big aircraft hurtled down the runway, lifted off into the night, and banked steeply to the left, coming around to a west-by-northwest course out over the ocean.
Nick looked at his watch. It was 8:14 p.m. PDST.
The first twenty-four hours—just getting into the city from the untowered landing field out east of the I-
It was more than fifty miles by car from this hillbilly Flabob Airport to his father-in-law’s neighborhood near Echo Park just northwest of the huge Homeland Security holding pen at Dodger Stadium. Using surface streets and alleys to keep out of the way of the fighting and massive evacuation, it was—Nick saw on the GPS mapping function of his phone—more than sixty miles with most of the route winding up through Ontario, Claremont, or Pomona, and down through south Pasadena. If he had to do it on foot, Nick thought, he might as well have started walking from Las Vegas. So the first thing he did was to steal an electric moped from a spanic kid who was just trying to flee the chaos behind his family, packed into an overloaded gelding SUV. Nick would have stolen the SUV, but the father— seeing the man with a gun emerge from the darkness—floored the rattling wreck of a vehicle, getting every dying amp he could from it while leaving his teenage son on the moped to a gunman’s mercy.
Nick used the Glock to wave the weeping kid off the moped, untied and tossed the bundled luggage to the now-howling teenager, and drove away without feeling the slightest hint of guilt. The father and family would return for the kid, even if they had to lash him to the roof rack with the rest of their belongings.
Probably.
The primitive display showed that the moped had been recently charged and had a range of two hundred miles. Nick told his phone to plot a bicycle-friendly trip to Echo Park and was informed that it would take him five and a half hours, but Nick knew that if he had to dodge fighters and fleeing civilians all the way, the trip would take at least twice as long.
Nick didn’t have the time for this shit. He knew now that he should have pulled his Glock on the pilot as they approached L.A. and demanded that the coward land them at some civilaviation field much closer to his destination—or even someplace like the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena.
Cursing his own stupidity, Nick squatted on the undersized moped and goosed the little machine to its full speed of thirty miles per hour. Somehow the fact that the moped gave forth only a low electrical hum made it seem to go even slower.
To the west, northwest, and southwest, as Nick left the empty, dark airport grounds, all of Los Angeles looked as if it were on fire. Scores of helicopter gunships and TV news choppers flitted in front of the orange glow like bats fleeing a burning belfry. Ancient California Air National Guard A10 jet ground-support bombers were making runs on targets somewhere in Chino. The sound of the distant explosions arrived long after the tiny flashes.
For the first three hours of his circuitous route west toward the city, no one shot at him. He’d brought a ball cap that he tugged low so his ethnicity wasn’t obvious in the dark, and there was something about a grown man on a kid’s battery-powered moped—perhaps it was the knees higher than the handlebars—that made him a nonthreatening figure.
Even though it was after midnight, the freeways and surface streets were filled with fleeing civilians. Nick realized that he was seeing the tail end of several days of evacuation from L.A.—mostly from East L.A.—of hundreds of thousands of spanics, both residents who’d been there for many decades and hordes of the new immigrants who’d come north on the wave of
Nick kept his phone GPS—he’d long ago named her Betty—constantly updating his route to keep him out of the path of these refugees, and Betty’s sexy voice whispered through his earbud to lead him down alleys across Claremont and Glendora, along empty bikepaths through Monrovia and Arcadia—most of the explosions and fighting seemed to be going on south of his route—and across the empty campus and soccer fields of Citrus College. The moped was happier on sidewalks than it was on streets.
Except for the military aircraft, there was no sign yet of the anglo military as the stars began to disappear behind him to the brightening east and the birds began to make their usual pre-sunrise clatter. Back in Glen Aven and southern Ontario, Nick had caught just enough glimpses of the shooting going on in the valley to the south to be sure that it was Aryan Brotherhood paramilitary, motorcycle gangs, Vietnamese and Chinese gangs from farther west and north, Mulholland mercenaries in armored Jeeps, and thousands of rioters from South Central L.A. whose parents and grandparents might have taken part in the Florence and Normandie fun forty years earlier. Leonard had described the ancient history of those riots to his daughter, and Dara, once calling the outbursts “the beginning of the modern era,” had passed on his account to Nick.
The gangs were looting and terrorizing the last of the refugees, but Nick saw enough to know that their primary goal was to burn down everything south of the Ventura Freeway and north of the Santa Ana Freeway. They appeared to be succeeding.
Nick had brought two water bottles and as many food bars as he’d been able to stuff in his jacket pockets and he sipped and munched as he drove west. The mobs of refugees were gone by the time he approached San Marino, the occasional police or anglo military presence visible only on primary roads and the entrance to freeways. As Nick headed west paralleling California Boulevard just north of the Huntington Botanical Gardens—the upscale neighborhoods were absolutely dark, their power obviously cut, as he wound along Betty’s chosen bikepaths and side streets—he congratulated himself on getting past the worst of it and essentially being home free.
Several shots hammered the predawn grayness. Nick felt a bullet bite the back of his left calf muscle even as a second slug killed the moped’s battery-driven motor.
Nick dumped the little bike on its side and rolled toward the gutter and a line of Dumpsters there as half a dozen more shots rang out. He scrabbled on all fours into a darker alley, ran half a block knowing that he was leaving a blood trail, and then crouched behind another Dumpster to check the damage.
The bullet had taken a lot of skin and some solid flesh but no real muscle. But it hurt like hell. Nick hiked up his pant leg and tied the wound off with a clean white handkerchief. He waited in the dark, Glock in hand, hoping that it was a random shot—or that, if they wanted the moped for some reason, his assailants would call it a morning when they saw they’d destroyed the little machine.
No such luck. They stalked him for the next half hour.
There were three of them—the big, stupid-sounding guy whom Nick thought of as the Linebacker, an older, skinny guy with the rifle whom he thought of as the Quarterback since he seemed to be literally calling the shots, and a greasy-haired teenager whom he thought of as Billy because he reminded Nick of the character Billy Clanton played by the young Dennis Hopper in the 1957
Nick hobbled south through front yards, dodging from tree to tree and wall to wall, with his three shooters following on foot. All three of them fired at him as he dodged and weaved across Orlando Road, hurtling a low fence and crashing his way into the 120 or so acres of the botanical gardens. The hunters each carried a backpack full of ammunition and seemed intent on firing it all off.
Nick had no idea what these idiots wanted of him… other than to make him dead. His best guess was that they had been playing cowboy for the duration of the Los Angeles fighting, raiding East L.A. neighborhoods at night just for the fun of killing someone. And they’d obviously gotten addicted to the killing. He had no other explanation
