“Where? I don’t see -”

“He went down there! You two go. We’ll take the street.”

I was on the ground beneath the shelter of the deck. I knew if I stepped out and tried to make my way down the steep slope to one of the streets or houses in the canyon below I would be exposed to my armed pursuers. Instead I turned and climbed up the hill under the house and further into the shelter of the structure. I knew there was a trench dug into the ground up there, where the sewer main had to be replaced after the quake. Above me there would also be the trapdoor that opened in the hallway. But I had designed it during the rebuilding of the house as an escape route, not a means of ingress. It was locked from inside and no use to me at the moment.

I moved up the hill, found the trench and rolled into it. I blindly moved my hands around at the bottom, looking for a weapon. All I found were cracked pieces of the old sewer main. I found one shard that was triangular and might work as a weapon. It would have to do.

Two men moved like shadows down the support beams to the ground below the deck. The moonlight reflected off the steel of their pistols. The reflections also showed me that one had on eyeglasses and I remembered him from the magazine story and photo. His name was Bernard Banks, known as B.B. King among the night crawlers. He had been at the bar at Chet’s when I had left.

The two shadows exchanged whispers and then split up, one moving down the hill and to the left, the other-Banks-maintaining his position. It was some kind of tactical strategy in which one would hopefully chase me into the waiting pistol of the other.

From my angle above him Banks was a hard target silhouetted by the lights from the canyon below. He was fifteen feet from me but I had nothing to use as a weapon except a shard of old iron pipe. Still, it was enough. I had survived more missions into the tunnels of Vietnam than I could remember. I’d once spent a whole night in the elephant grass with the enemy moving all around me. And I had lived and worked for twenty-five-plus years on the streets of this city with a badge. This kid was going to be no match for me. I knew none of them would be.

When Banks turned to look down the canyon slope, I rose up in the trench and threw the pipe shard into the brush out to his right. It made a sound like an animal moving through high grass. As he turned, tensed and raised his weapon I slid over the top of the trench and started moving down the slope toward him, all the while keeping one of the iron beams between us as a sound and visual blind.

I got to the beam and he still had not turned from the direction of the sounds in the brush. He was just putting the misdirection together and finally turning back when I got to him. My left fist hit him squarely between the eyes while my right closed over the gun and I put a finger through the trigger guard. I had actually been aiming for his mouth but the punch broke his glasses in half at the bridge and staggered him just the same. I pivoted and swung him in a 180-degree arc, gathering momentum and putting him headfirst into one of the support beams. His skull made a sound like a water balloon breaking and the iron beam hummed like a tuning fork. He dropped to the ground like a bag of wet laundry.

I put his gun into the waistband of my pants and then turned him over. The blood on his face looked black in the moonlight. I quickly propped his back against the beam, brought his knees up and folded his arms on top of them. I leaned his face down on his arms.

Soon I heard the other one call for him from further down the hillside.

“B.B., you got him? Hey, Beeb!”

I backed away from Banks and crouched in the bushes ten feet away. I pulled the gun from my pants. In the moonlight I could not tell the make. It was a black steel pistol with no safety. Probably a Glock. I then realized it was probably my own gun. It must have been the one Milton had shoved into my neck. Banks had taken it from his body.

I heard the other one approaching in the brush. He was coming from my left and would cross within five feet of me when he approached Banks. I waited until I heard him and knew he was close.

“Banks, what are you doing? You pussy, get up and -”

He shut up when he felt the barrel of the gun against his neck.

“Drop the gun or you die right here.”

I heard it hit the ground. With my free hand I reached up and grabbed the back of his collar and pulled him around and then back underneath the shelter of the deck where we couldn’t be seen from above. We were both facing the lights of the canyon and the freeway below. He was the fourth king, the one in the magazine picture who had the bar towel over his shoulder. I couldn’t remember his name in all of the excitement. He’d been sitting at the bar at Chet’s with Banks.

“What’s your name, asshole?”

“Jimmy Fazio. Look, I -”

“Shut up.”

He was quiet. I leaned forward and whispered into his ear.

“Look at the lights. You are going to die here, Jimmy Fazio. The lights are the last thing you’ll ever see.”

“Please…”

“Please? Is that what Angella Benton said? Did she say please to you?”

“No, please, no, I mean, I wasn’t even there.”

“Convince me.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Or die.”

“Okay, it wasn’t me. Please believe me. It was Linus and Vaughn. It was their idea and they did it without even telling the rest of us. We couldn’t stop it because we didn’t know about it.”

“Yeah, what else? You’re only alive because you’re talking.”

“That’s why we shot Vaughn. Linus said we had to because he was going to take the money and pin the girl on Linus.”

“What about Linus getting shot? Was that part of the plan?”

He shook his head.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen but we figured out how to make it work. Like a cover for us buying the clubs.”

“Yeah, it worked all right. What about Marty Gessler and Jack Dorsey?”

“Who?”

I jammed the gun’s muzzle hard into his neck.

“Don’t give me that shit. I want the whole goddamn story.”

“I don’t -”

“Faz! You fucking coward!”

The voice came from above us. I looked up and saw the upper body of a man hanging down over the edge of the deck. His arms were extended, two hands on a gun. I let go of my captive and dove left just as the gunfire erupted. The shooter was Oliphant. He screamed as he fired. Just blindly screamed. The whole shelter area beneath the house lit up with the flashes. Slugs ricocheted off the iron beams. I came up on the side of one of the beams and fired three times in a quick burst at him. His shout cut off and I knew I’d hit him. I watched as he dropped his gun, lost his balance and fell the twenty feet down, making a heavy thud in the bushes.

I looked around for Fazio and found him on the ground near Banks. He’d been hit in the upper chest but was still alive. It was too dark to see his eyes but I knew they were open and panicked, looking at me for help. I grabbed his jaw and turned his face to mine.

“Can you talk?”

“Uh… it hurts.”

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Tell me about the FBI agent. Where is she? What happened to her?”

“Uh…”

“Who killed the cop? Was that Linus, too?”

“Linus…”

“Is that a yes? Did Linus do it?”

He didn’t answer. I was losing him. I lightly patted his cheeks and then shook him by the collar.

“Come on, man, stay with me. Was that a yes? Fazio, did Linus Simonson kill the cop?”

Nothing. He was gone. Then a voice came from behind me.

“I think that would be a yes.”

I turned. It was Simonson. He had found the trapdoor and come down out of the house behind me. He was holding a sawed-off shotgun. I slowly stood up, leaving my gun on the ground next to Fazio’s body and raising my hands. I backed away from Simonson, stepping further down the hill.