Eighteen

Stein careened into the Malibu substation and parked in the restricted spot right behind Chief Bayliss’s Cutlass Sierra. He left the windows cracked open for Watson and hurried inside. Every police station Stein had ever been inside of‑and during his activist days he had been inside quite a few‑reeked of the same musty stench of arrogance and petty abuse of power that dispirits everything it touches.

It wasn’t the tear gas and truncheons that cops used to break up anti‑war demonstrations that turned Stein into an activist. It wasn’t for any bleeding heart liberal outrage at their excessive violence against violent criminals. They had a dangerous job. Some of them snap. Ok, so do timing belts on Mercedes. It happens. What ultimately galvanized Stein against them was their attitude toward ordinary citizens. How they made people feel like criminals. How they made inefficiency the rule, taking the greatest number of steps possible to perform the simplest request. As if before they could make a phone call for you they had to first invent electricity.

The desk sergeant was typing a report on a stolen car. After each keystroke that he thumped in with a heavy index finger, he picked up the Driver’s License, changed glasses, found the next number, changed glasses, typed it, changed glasses and fumbled to pick up the license for the next letter. All the time ignoring Stein, who stood eighteen inches from him and made several futile efforts to impose himself in the sergeant’s line of sight. The name under the ON DUTY sign said Sgt. O’Bladovich.

“Sergeant O’Bladovich. I need to see Chief Bayliss.”

“O’Bladovich got transferred downtown.”

He continued his ritual, typing another letter, undoing it and correcting it. That was it. Stein strode past his post, barged through the door clearly indicated FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY into a vestibule outside the private office of Stein’s longtime foil and adversary, Deputy Interim Precinct Commander Jack Bayliss.

Bayliss’ career in law enforcement began as a seventh grade gym teacher. He had a tight, compact body, piercing gray eyes and a well‑earned reputation for the liberal use of lanyard on ass cheek. When Bayliss’s uncle, a local hack politician and part owner of a roofing business, got himself elected to the local Civilian Police Review Board, he fast‑tracked his ambitious nephew out of the gym and into the penal system. In the wake of the corruption scandal in the mid‑90s that involved too many high ranking cops and too many hookers in hot tubs up in Arcadian Fields, Bayliss’s appointment to the job of assistant chief was LA politics at its purist. His uncle, by then sitting on the city council, made him a compromise choice over two men and a woman who were far more qualified than he, which is to say qualified at all.

There was a three‑seat wooden bench outside the chief’s private office. Morty Greene was sitting on that bench, his left wrist in a metal cuff.

“Oh Jesus,” Stein sighed. “What the hell is going on?”

“Well look who’s here,” said Edna Greene. She was sitting beside her boy almost entirely eclipsed at first by his frame. “Mister no suggestion of wrongdoing.” Stein felt the sting of her rebuke for trusting him.

“Edna, I’m here to fix this.”

“It’s Mrs. Greene to you.”

Stein pushed open the door to Bayliss’s private office and marched in.

“Coach. What the fuck?”

Bayliss glared up at his long‑time adversary. Over the years, by design or coincidence, Bayliss had been the victim of Stein’s most celebrated pranks. His original “Victory Garden” had been grown behind the parking lot of Bayliss’s first precinct; the “Pot in every Chicken” happening was staged at his promotion dinner.

“You don’t ‘what the fuck’ me, Howard. I ‘what the fuck’ you!”

The door was ajar and Edna clapped her hands in ironic appreciation of the performance. “Look at the two white boys arguing with each other. Oh, yes. I’m convinced.”

Bayliss kicked the door shut. “Don’t call me Coach. I will have you in a cell ‘till you’re ninety.” Bayliss was short and cold as the month of February. He prided himself on remembering the full first name of everyone he had ever arrested. Stein wisely withheld correcting him until he had gotten what he had come for.

“I just thought I would tell you, the guy you’ve got handcuffed out there isn’t Nicholette Bradley’s killer.”

“And you would know this, how?”

“Trust me.”

The hoarse gust of wind that wheezed out of Bayliss’s throat approximated an ironic laugh. Bayliss glared before speaking. The temperature in his eyes rising to the melting point of tungsten.

“I was up at the victim’s house the night she was killed. It was me who made the 9‑1‑1 call.”

“What in hell were you doing in that house, Howard?” Did you kill her?”

“Yes, coach, I did. You’ve busted this case wide open. Shall we call a press conference?”

“You think you’re so goddamn clever. Do you know how long I can put you away and not have to tell anybody why?”

“I’m coming to you as an ally.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way. But were you always this Jewish?”

“How could I take that the wrong way?”

Bayliss eyes half‑lidded into a smile of savage mirth. “I know exactly what kind of athlete you were, Howard. Eleventh man on a nine‑man team. Splashing oil on the base paths and thinking it’s funny to see other people fall. That’s what you are, Howard. You’re a disrupter.”

“I appreciate where you’re coming from. If I were you looking at me I’d think the same thing. But I am sincerely here because I know who killed Nicholette Bradley. She came to me earlier that day. She thought her friend was in danger.”

“She thought her friend was in danger and she came to you? How did that work out for her?”

Stein took the cheap shot and did not return fire, which quelled some of the chief’s animosity, though he remained healthily wary. “If you are fucking with me, Howard, I will have your Sammie’s tacked up to that bulletin board.”

“I’m here. Why would you think I’m fucking with you?”

“Because a prick can only do two things and you’re not pissing.”

“Why are you holding Morty Greene? He didn’t kill her.”

“You’re so sure of that?”

“Yes I’m sure of it.”

“His truck was stopped under suspicious circumstances.”

“Carrying a load of designer shampoo bottles?”

“Yeah. How’d you know that?”

“This is what I’m saying.”

“In the course of a legal search, the deceased’s name was found written on a piece of paper in the glove compartment of Duluth Greene’s truck.”

“Give me a fucking break. By that logic I killed Chiquita Banana and Jennie Craig.”

“Nobody’s charging him with any crime yet. We want to talk to him.”

“And that’s why he’s handcuffed?”

“You see the size of that boy?”

“Coach, I’m going to repay you for every bad thing I ever did. You’re going to be a national hero.”

Stein gave Bayliss the streamlined version of the connection between Morty and the counterfeit shampoo bottles, and what had happened that gruesome night when Michael Esposito and Paul Vane had killed Nicholette. It choked Stein to mention Paul Vane’s name in connection with the event, but in the spirit of full disclosure he did. The only minor detail he omitted was that he had come to his revelation stoned on Goodpasture’s orchids.

The funeral cortege played on Bayliss’s TV in the background. His office was sparsely furnished with the impersonal essentials, desk, metal chairs, file cabinets, a phone with six buttons, a computer‑ highlighting the chief’s tenuous interim status. Celebrities and common people alike pronounced eulogies for the slain woman. From PETA, from the pope, from parents of children with anorexia. It was a revelation to Stein that she was so much more than just a pretty face.

The desk sergeant who was not O’Bladovich blew into Bayliss’s office, all red‑faced and puffing. “Chief, there’s a civilian loose in the building.” Then he noticed Stein standing there before him. He put two and two together at the speed of a battleship trying to change direction. He finally came up with, “Oh,” and reckoning that his work had been effectively done, he hitched his pants up over his belly and exited.

Bayliss had never taken his eyes off Stein. “Why are you telling me this, Howard? Maybe to set me up to arrest the wrong people in the biggest case of my life?”

“Not this time, chief.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“The people who killed Nicholette have my daughter.”

Stein saw the two movies running alongside each other in the chief’s internal Cineplex. In Theater 1 he is a decorated hero, parades in open cars, fear and respect in the eyes of the world and the interim tag is removed. In Theater 2 Stein is pointing at him and laughing hysterically.

“I swear to God, Howard. If this is you being you I will see you burn.”

Bayliss ’ S assembled task force was all in military black, adorned with gas masks and automatic weapons. Stein felt the room begin to shudder. He thought at first it was his heart but it was the police chopper revving up on the helipad. Bayliss strapped his flight helmet in place.

“Where’s mine?” Stein asked.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“It’s my daughter. What about our deal!”

“We had no deal.”

“And if she needed an appendectomy would you do it yourself? No, you leave it to the professionals.”

Stein hurried along in their wake. Morty Greene was still handcuffed to the bench outside the office. “And let this guy out of his damn cuffs, for chrissake!”

Bayliss nodded subtly to his sergeant and Morty was carefully uncuffed.

“Thanks for nothing,” Morty said, and wouldn’t look at Stein.

“Hey! I didn’t get you into this. I’m getting you out of it.”

“Boys,” Edna mediated, “Thank you, Mister Stein.”

Stein’s attention was arrested by the TV at the front desk. Celebrity mourners were being interviewed like it was the red carpet at the Emmy Awards and again there was the aggrieved face of Paul Vane on screen. The pain behind his soulful eyes still looked real. Was he that good an actor to feign such innocent grief? And why wasn’t he at the Ivy, which was where he was sending chief Bayliss? Stein tried to peer behind Vane in the camera’s shot to see if Angie and Lila were with him in the limo. But its windows were tinted. He yelled to the chief to wait a second, but the cordon of commandos was clattering up the stairs to the roof.

He jumped back into Bayliss’s office and used his phone to call Mattingly at the warehouse. He was actually glad to hear the familiar nasal, wheedling tones.

“Mrs. Higgit. This is Harry Stein.”

“Why are you calling from the police station?”

The caller ID thing still freaked him out but he brushed past it. “This is very important. I need to know if Michael Esposito is there.”

“I have no dealings with that area of the company,” she said even more officiously than usual. “I work strictly with Mister Mat‑tingly.”

“I know who you work for. But I want‑”

She would not yield him conversational right‑of‑way but plowed straight through the verbal intersection. “Whatever goes on behind closed doors, and I’m not saying anything does, it’s not my business.”

“Mrs. Higgit.”

“I don’t judge. What other people choose for themselves‑”

“Stop talking!” he commanded.

She allowed herself to be interrupted long enough to hear his question and to reply that although she had neither the time nor inclin‑a‑shee‑on to keep tabs on anyone else’s business, she had noticed in passing that Mr. Esposito had two visitors today. She described Lila in fastidious detail and the “wild and unruly” teenage girl with her.

Stein smarted under the indictment of his permissive child‑raising. “Listen to me carefully. Your office looks down onto the visitor’s parking lot. Is there a white Acura?”

“I don’t know brands.”

“Look out your window.”

“Is there a white car? With a sunroof?”

“It would appear to be so, yes.”

“Do not let them leave.”

Watson was barking excitedly in the car when Stein ran out into the parking lot. A cordon of police had surrounded Stein’s Camry. Stein looked with disbelief at his rear tire. It had been booted.

“Real sorry,” the fat desk sergeant said looking with ironic concern at the piece of heavy metal machinery locking the wheel in place. “I had no idea it was you.” He made a show of examining his key ring, then pronounced with great dole. “Oh I seem to have misplaced the key.”

The chopper had lifted off and was vectoring off toward the canyon. Stein was crazed enough to grab non O’Bladovich by the shirtsleeve. “Listen to me. You’ve got to radio the chief and bring him back.” He looked deeply into his face for a sign of intelligent recognition. From the far side of the complex, Morty Greene’s red pickup truck had gotten out of impound and was heading down the driveway.

Stein released his hold and unlocked his own car door, grabbed Watson out of the front seat and chased after Morty’s truck, which had now driven past. He waved his free arm wildly, trying to put himself into the reflection of his rearview mirror. The truck slowed by degrees, allowing Stein to catch up.

“They booted my car,” Stein heaved, out of breath. “We’ve got to get to the warehouse.”

“I don’t think so,” Morty said and he popped the clutch and began to accelerate.

“Duluth. Where are your manners? You do as the man asks.”

“Mama.”

Morty slowed the truck down. Edna opened the passenger‑side door and slid into the nest between the two front seats to make room for Stein. “No, please. I’ll sit there,” Stein insisted and climbed over her into the metal creche alongside Morty so she could have the cushioned seat. “They have my daughter,” Stein said looking straight ahead and shrinking the volume of his body so Morty would have room to drive.” They tore ass down Topanga Canyon. At Pacific Coast Highway they hit a dead stop. Nicholette’s funeral cortege, inching its way up the coast, was endless. Police scrutinized the credentials of every driver and passenger; the Paparazzi long since having learned the trick of turning on their headlights and pretending to be part of a funeral procession.

The tinted window of a silver Mercedes sedan opened. As the glass slid down, the reflection of the helmeted CHP officer yielded to the face of the driver inside the car. Stein leaned forward and wiped away grime from the inside of the Ford’s windshield. He could not see the driver but the passenger alongside him was Michael Esposito. That took some brass balls! Coming to the funeral of the person you’d killed. He couldn’t see into the back seat and was suddenly possessed by the possibility that Angie and Lila might be tied up there.

The woman in the Escalade directly in front of them was conducting an animated conversation on her cell phone. Stein looked desperately to the right of the Escalade. There was narrow shoulder and to the right of it, a ditch that in winter was a creek.

“Don’t even think about it,” Morty said, preempting Stein’s next thought. “There’d be two funerals.”

“You’re right.”

In the moment Morty relaxed, Stein stamped his left foot down onto Morty’s colossal right boot, jamming it down onto the accelerator. The truck lurched forward. Stein yanked the wheel to the right and they darted around the big tank and careened precariously along the shoulder. The grade was too steep to pull back onto the road and the line of cars was unbroken. They could see the horrified looks on people’s faces in the other cars.

“We’re gonna be dead like Butch and Sundance,” Morty howled.

“And Sundance’s mother,” Edna Greene added.

Morty threw Stein’s foot off his own, but there was nothing to do now but fly and hope that none of the six regiments of cops noticed them; and that the phalanx of sirens and motorcycles and patrol cars hot in their pursuit was a coincidence.

“It’s ok. I know these people. Keep going.”

“You know these people?” Edna repeated. “I feel really confident, now.”

In the next moment the truck was enveloped by police vehicles. A voice boomed out of a bullhorn. “STOP THE VEHICLE. PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE DASH WHERE I CAN SEE THEM.” Rifles were pointed at them from every direction, including from above, where Bayliss, having observed the chase and overheard the radio transmissions, had swooped down from the sky and landed in front of them. Dressed in his fatigues, Bayliss leaped out in a Prime Time news pose. When he saw that his quarry was Stein and Morty Greene, the catch he had already thrown back, he was furious that he had been diddled again and made a fool of.

“I swear to God you have fucked with me for the very last time in your life.”

Up ahead, the Mercedes followed the rest of the procession up the hill and was now gone from sight. “Coach!” Stein yelled, then, humbly, “Chief. The killers are getting away.”

With the door to freedom open, Watson sprang from Edna Greene’s arms and bolted out of the truck and up the hill. “Watson!” Stein vaulted around to the driver’s side of the truck and with the adrenaline rush of a pregnant woman, he shoved Morty to the passenger side and jumped in. He rammed the truck into gear, popped the clutch and held on. The rear wheels sprayed mud and grass and gravel, caught traction, and the truck shot forward up the hill.

Morty wrested the wheel away. “They’re gonna kill us.”

“They won’t even chase us. They think it’s a dead end.”

Indeed, as Morty peered cautiously back, he saw that the police were exercising uncharacteristic restraint. The truck jounced up the rutted road, its smooth tires spinning them ass‑left and ass‑right as it tried to gain traction. A small turnoff to an unpaved road loomed ahead.

“Take it,” Stein yelled. “Go right!”

Together they hauled the wheel right. Thistles and hedge whapped against both sides of the chassis.

“It’s cool. I used to take Watson here when he was a pup a million years ago, before the mortuary bought the land. There’s a back way in.”

“Be more fun to reminisce if I had a cushion,” Edna observed.

A quarter‑mile further on, they found Watson sitting alongside a turnoff to a paved road, under a sign for the ETERNAL FLAME CRYPT AND CREMATORIUM. Orchards of young fruit trees swayed in the breeze on both sides of the road behind barbed wire fences. Morty was freaked out by the overly informational signage that described the high tech immolation units where controlled burns of ionized magnesium brought the kilns to temperatures of 4,000 degrees.

“I don’t know about being cremated. Hate to wind up a plate of barbecued ribs.”

“You’d be a lot less than that,” Stein said. “Be a handful of talcum powder.”

“No more of this talk,” Edna scolded. “I thought Jewish people had issues with ovens.”

Stein found what he was looking for, and parked under the sign that read NO ADMITTANCE. Morty and Edna passed a look between them that said it must be fun to be white and not have to obey signs. A trail led between the fences, uphill. “This path takes us to the mortuary side,” Stein said. “Anyway, it used to.”

Edna’s hips weren’t going to make that uphill climb and Stein asked if she wouldn’t mind staying back here with Watson, which was fine with everyone. Morty’s instinct was to stay with her, but she frowned on him. “Pay your debts on time or they gather interest.” Morty followed Stein into the underbrush. The pathway made a tight double ‘S’ between two rows of tall bougainvillea, and emerged at the top of the hill into a broad, quite beautiful, sequestered dell.

The service for Nicholette was being conducted in a small amphitheater on the level below them. The arched portal and floor of the entryway were made of marble. The walls appeared smooth until you looked more closely and saw the hundreds of little sliding vault drawers that were built in. Morty shook his head profoundly when he realized what they were. Several hundred mourners were gathered on the grassy lawn looking up at a portly, white‑whiskered Reverend Parsegian. Stein recognized him from late night cable TV. His voice was raspy with the ravages of non‑filter cigarettes and Aquavit. He opened a small parcel wrapped in a lovely Indian cloth.

“Death,” he intoned, “whatever we think it is, it’s bound to be something else.” He took a handful of what were presumably Nicholette’s remains and scattered the ashes to the winds. “Let her beauty fill the world,” he prayed.

“Any time you want to tell me what we’re doing,” Morty hinted.

Stein scanned the crowd below him intently. “I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.”

“That clears it all up.”

Stein sensed peripheral movement along the ridgeline. Fifty yards away, the diminutive figures of two mourners who had separated from the main body were absconding in rapid lockstep. Paul Vane was wearing a dark suit and designer sunglasses. Michael Es‑posito was in Hunter Thompson gonzo white.

“That’s them,” Stein whispered.

Michael was doing most of the talking. Vane listened like a child being told a harsh truth by a younger, wiser, crueler boy. Stein tried to penetrate through the pantomime. “I think they may have my daughter and my friend in their car.”

After a brief huddle below, Vane and Michael Esposito departed in opposite directions.

“You take the little one,” Stein ordered.

Morty bolted out of their little culvert in the direction of Paul Vane.

“No, the other little one,” Stein yelled, but Morty covered the ground across the open field with amazing speed and was nearly upon him.

Michael Esposito had undulated along the back side of the marble wall and was out of sight. Stein gauged where he would emerge, and lumbered down the grassy side of the hill, still favoring his injured ankle. The grade was steeper than it appeared and the grass concealed uneven contours of the hillside. He couldn’t break his hurtling momentum and had to throw himself to the ground and roll. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he felt like he had run into a stone wall. For a moment he feared he was paralyzed. He took mental inventory, discovered nothing was broken and pulled himself up by the handles of the sliding crypts.

Moments later Michael Esposito came around the wall and Stein stepped into his path.

“Hello, Michael,” Stein said.

If the little shit were frightened he didn’t show it. Stein grabbed him by the scruff of his shoulders and swore to him “If any harm comes to my daughter, I mean any harm, I will tear every inch of you apart, starting with your eyes. Where are they?”

Stein’s threat was met with a smile, a killer’s courtesy. “Lovely girl,” he said.

Morty Greene pushed a miserable Paul Vane into the picture. Vane’s eyes were red and he extended his hands to be cuffed. “I am the man you’re looking for. Michael had nothing to do with it.”

Vane’s eyes were on Michael Esposito, imploring him to look upon him with favor, which he did not.

“Are they in the car?” Stein directed the question to the one place he thought he might get a straight answer. He thought he saw a sympathetic response from Paul Vane telling him “no.”

Morty Greene’s investigation went along less subtle ground, He bent down and grabbed the elegant cuffs of Esposito’s pant legs and lifted up and inverted the man several feet off the ground. He shook loose his car keys and quite a bit of pocket change, a nail clipper and silver flask of brandy.

“Easy on the rough stuff,” Stein said. “He likes it too much.”

The electronic key set the welcoming lights flashing on Paul Vane’s Mercedes. They had parked it at the end of a row for easy egress. Stein ran to the car and threw open the doors to liberate his daughter and friend girl.

But the car was empty. He knuckled the hood of the trunk. He pressed the button enough times so it finally opened. He pulled up the platform that hid only the miniature spare tire, no prisoners

Morty was right behind him with the culprits in tow when out of the shadows of the “Walls of Eternity,” David Hart emerged.

“Oh Good Christ,” Morty gaped. “Another one.”

“I thought I might find you here,” Stein said.

“You should be more careful with the women you love,” Hart advised him cooly. “That’s three of them you’ve lost.”

Vane beseeched Stein to believe him as he grasped for Michael Esposito’s hand. “I never meant for them to put them in danger.”

“Ironic, isn’t it, how things work out?” said David Hart. And Stein watched as the picture was shifted one more time by the deft hands of the 3‑card Monte dealer: Michael Esposito spurned the hand of Paul Vane and stepped into the embrace of David Hart.

“Did you think I was blind to your little game?” Hart flaunted his disdain at the flabbergasted and now twice‑jilted Paul Vane. “You have such compassion, Paul. You didn’t want to witness my humiliation. Compassion must be a quality that comes with age. And God knows you have oodles of that. So much age that it makes me wretch every time you touch me. Your old alligator fingers. Your old smell. And I’ve found someone who will take care of me in perpetuity.”

David Hart kissed Michael Esposito on the face and neck, never taking his eyes off Paul Vane as he did. “You thought you were leaving me?”

“Oh my,” Paul Vane breathed.

Morty pulled the smoochers apart. “That is really disgusting.”

“You don’t like to see two gay men kissing?” Esposito taunted him.

“I don’t even like to see straight men kissing.”

The picture manifested itself to Stein for the eleventh different time, but this time he knew it had come to rest. Stein realized that once again he had allowed all his conclusions to rest on the outdated karmic principle that good prevailed and that people got what they deserved. Hence his unchallenged acceptance of the notion that Paul Vane had been the one to leave David Hart. It was obvious now that the reverse had been true, that David had left him. David and Michael Esposito were the molecule; Vane was the odd man out, a stray electron spinning in lonely orbit around them.

Stein stepped into the narrow space between Hart and Esposito. “The very next thing that’s going to happen is you are telling me where my daughter is or my homophobic friend will start bashing heads.”

“Yes, that’s very butch,” said Michael, “but Let’s talk about what’s actually going to happen. Your daughter’s safety is time sensitive. So the sooner we all agree, the happier we all are.” He saw Stein’s abhorrence and reveled in it. “You think you’re smarter and morally superior to everyone. You’re a joke. You’re a minstrel show. Everything you believe about the world is over.”

Stein made himself play “Moonlight Sonata” in his mind. Fingers moving slowly up and slowly down.

David Hart got cranky. “Hello. I believe I’m here.”

Michael smiled at his new lover then at the others. “In a few moments David and I are going to depart for destinations unknown, taking with us only the ten or twelve million we’ve garnered so far from our little moonlighting venture.”

“ Our little moonlight adventure,” Paul Vane amended, with just a bit of irony. “You said you were going to let him down easy and come back to me.”

At the end of every relationship, one lover is willing to take as many wrong roads as necessary to find the right way home; the other has already called off the search. Michael patted Vane’s perspiring pate. “Look at it this way, sweetie. Everybody wins. Mat‑tingly gets his whole company. David gets taken care of in perpetuity. In your old age you’ve had both me and David in our glorious youth. And now you get the pleasure of knowing you’ve brought the two of us together. You’re thrice blessed.”

“My daughter,” said Stein.

Esposito went on with blithe unconcern “In an hour, when David and I are safely outside the reach of extradition treaties, you will be informed where to find your ill‑mannered progeny and her disagreeable nanny, or whoever that cloying woman is.”

Vane looked at Michael, still trying to salvage a way to think of him kindly. “My dear boy,” he whispered, “you have to tell him where his daughter is now. An hour will be too late.”

“I’m not dear, I’m not a boy, and I’m not yours,” said Michael.

Vane turned to Stein. “I know where she is. I can take you to her.”

“You don’t know anything,” David Hart spat. His hand flashed into his pocket and emerged with a snub‑nosed. 22 pistol. The report in the wide‑open air sounded like a little pop. Vane clutched his chest and went down. Morty Greene engulfed Hart, took away his gun and then very nearly disarmed him in the literal sense. Michael tried to bolt, but Morty did a one‑arm pushup, holding David to the ground and leg‑whipping his fleeing accomplice. Small bodies lay strewn all about.

Stein knelt alongside Paul Vane and pushed a handkerchief against the wound to staunch the blood.

“Are you all right?”

“Just a glancing blow to the heart.”

Now the entire landscape began to vibrate. The SWAT helicopter swooped in over the top of the hill. Chief Bayliss leaped out again, trying to understand through the tableau in front of him what might have taken place. He saw Morty Greene on the ground holding Michael Esposito down with his legs and David Hart down with his arm

Vane looked up at Bayliss from Stein’s arms. “We need to get to Espe headquarters right away.”

“Who is this?” Bayliss demanded to know. “Who are all of them?” David Hart and Michael Esposito and Paul Vane all began to speak at once.

“Sir.” Morty Greene suggested politely. “Best you listen to the little bleeding one.”