April Smith - Judas Horse

St. Luke’s is on a hill, protected by wrought-iron gates — a shabby plot of dull redbrick buildings and a couple of elms. The bright spots on campus are a Romanesque Church built in 1891 and the indoor tennis courts. Laumann’s twelve-year-old son is a talented player, and St. Luke’s has a good team, which makes it almost worth the price tag. Waiting for scrawny, long-legged Alex to come through the gates in his blue plaid uniform, toting his racket in a junior varsity bag, yakking it up with scores of red-cheeked, cheerful friends, allows Laumann to believe, for fifteen minutes in the car-pool line, that his insanely overstressed, overburdened, slightly criminal life might be worth something.

Carrying signs but silent still, we reach the entrance to the school. The gates pull back automatically, right on time, and the sidewalk becomes alive with the random energy of a couple hundred bouncing children in blue plaid uniforms. The engines in the line of waiting cars fire one by one, and Laumann sits up with anticipation. They have a new baby girl at home who isn’t doing well — respiratory problems, underweight, and waking in the night. Whenever he stops moving, even for a minute, he falls into an exhausted daze. The weather is still soupy and the wipers make it worse, so Laumann hasn’t turned them on. Looking through the watery glass, he never sees us coming.

At first, we mix in with the crowd — all of us with the same greasy hair, grungy denim, and attitude as the neighborhood types. Many of us are not much older than the miscreants on the corner, or the seniors at St. Luke’s. Moving in clusters of three and four, we wave our banners: MURDERER! WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER!

The schoolchildren slow down.

“Save the wild horses!”

“Save our American heritage!”

Chanting in unison, we, the protesters, bulldoze through the students, whose faces have softened with confusion and fear.

My heart is beating hard. The adrenaline rush has hit both sides. Parents are getting out of cars and clogging the sidewalk. Laumann jumps into the role of deputy state director, striding through the scene with cell phone to his ear, reporting the action to 911. He has been through this before, and means to assert his authority, but then on the police recording, later, in the midst of a calm recital, you will be able to hear his naked panic: “They’re going after my son!”

Two agitators have surrounded Alex, chanting, “Your daddy kills horses!”

Alex’s blue eyes are wide as he stares at one angry face, then another.

“Your daddy kills horses!”

Louder, closer, not giving way. One of them, a girl with a couple of nose rings, tries to force Alex to take a stuffed horse, dripping red.

Harassing a twelve-year-old was not the game plan.

Nobody wants to hurt a child.

But Darcy is committed to the cause.

“Free the horses!” I shout.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” the boy yells, and hits the girl with the nose rings in the knees with his tennis racket and keeps on swinging.

Laumann’s running through the mob, awkward in a business suit and the raincoat, face contorted with desperation, screaming at someone behind me to stop. I turn and catch sight of a streaking figure — a young man wearing a backpack and a denim jacket with neo-Nazi ornamentation. I had not seen him in the staging area under the marquee, but now he is barreling like a missile directly for Alex. POP! Like a firecracker, and the child staggers, eyes in shock, splattered with blood.

The small explosion triggers utter terror. Parents there to pick up their children find themselves grabbing them and rolling under cars, or dragging them away, running wildly.

I stay where I am for one slow-motion fraction of a second as Laumann gets to his son.

“Alex, are you shot? Show me where!” he cries, frantic hands all over the boy, who is breathing hard but standing on his feet.

“I’m okay, Dad — they didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t do anything?”

Laumann pulls Alex — he’s walking — out of the crowd. The white shirt of his school uniform is streaked with crimson, which has grotesquely stained the sidewalk, along with Laumann’s raincoat and Alex’s pale and freckled cheeks.

“I’m o- kay! ” He twists away from his father’s anxious touch. “Leave me alone! It wasn’t a gun; it’s just red paint.”

But where Laumann grew up, you slaughtered your own meat, and he knows the slippery consistency and sickly iron smell. It’s blood — real cow’s blood. Filthy, unclean putrescence, degrading innocent children.

The father’s hands become fists. “They’re dead,” Laumann vows. “They are dead. Come with me; let’s wipe this off.”

Someone has found a water bottle, and now Laumann attempts to soak a tissue and cleanse his son’s face, but his hands are shaking and the tissue dissolves.

“Dad, you have to chill,” instructs his twelve-year-old soldier.

Laumann wipes his own wet eyes and whispers hoarsely, “Where are the police?”

Waiting by the window, I keep watch for the connect. Moonlight decants through the slats of the blinds the way I remember moonlight as a child — so steady and substantial, it seemed as if you could wash your face with it, a potion of radiance that seeped through the drowsing windows of the brick house in Long Beach, penetrating the gloom of my grandfather’s world.

From Darcy’s window, I can see two girl punkers with hair like crested Gila monsters locking up the Cosmic Café. Terribly young and terribly thin, one of them is pregnant. Doo-wop resounds from the African drumming center. The girls put their arms around each other, matching steps along the darkened avenue.

The war is escalating in our little world. The techs are calling the attack on twelve-year-old Alex Laumann a “blood bomb.” The best evidence for this comes from analysis of the bloodstain patterns — the “spines” of the splatter pattern on the sidewalk and on the clothing of the victim, which tell you the amount of energy transfer. The smaller the droplets, the greater the force that projected them. The force of cow’s blood as it spat out of the backpack was created by a small amount of gunpowder, detonated by the attacker as he approached the child.

We are back to the signature device that killed Steve Crawford, which is tied to the firebomb that blew up Ernie’s Meats on the docks of Portland, and possibly other unsolved attacks over the past years credited to FAN: a fire at a genetic-engineering company that resulted in fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage; two explosive devices using Tovex that went off at 3:00 a.m. at the construction site of a new pharmaceutical facility, destroying three concrete trucks and causing the abandonment of a twenty-million-dollar project.

Megan Tewksbury had to have known about the blood bomb and the mysterious young man, which is, finally, the best argument for infiltrating her. At last, the Operation Wildcat team agrees with what I’ve been saying all along — until we can ID the person using the alias Julius Emerson Phelps, Megan is our best way in.

Ablack van pulls up and double-parks in the street below, taillights blinking. Angling sideways at the window to get a better view, I see two figures emerge and open the rear doors. This is the unit I have been waiting for. I am at the door to the apartment even before there is knocking, urgent and sharp, like the Gestapo in the night.

“ Darcy? Are you in there? Darcy DeGuzman! Open the door.” I unlock the door. “People are sleeping!”

Two shaggy hipsters stand in the hall. One is a white male with silver earrings and baggy India-print pants. The other is a gregarious African-American female whose long cornrows are woven with beads. Both wear heavy rubber boots. Their faces are sweaty and streaked with mud. The stench of hay and dead things is a sharp hit to the nose.