April Smith - Judas Horse

Stone has never been more lucid. Even his skin looks baby soft and shaven. His hair is clean and straight; the summer sun has made it more blond than gray. He is back to the agreeable persona of the lawyer of the people, a northwest professional in a denim shirt and tie, moving confidently through the city.

“Nervous?” he asks.

“Terrified.”

He makes me recite it again. We drive up. We wait. At 8:00 p.m., Laumann comes out of the house and walks down the driveway. He plays tennis at the club on Thursday nights. His court time is always 8:30. We put on the ski masks. I get out of the car. Stone keeps the engine running. I walk up to the target. I make my speech and empty the gun into his chest.

“Less than a minute,” Stone promises.

“I’m still nervous.”

“You can’t miss at point-blank range.”

And I’ve been practicing. Not just shooting Stone’s pistol up at the range but figuring out how to switch the magazines — the blanks that Jason provided, for the live ones in the gun — in two swift moves.

“I’ve been thinking about his wife and kids.”

“Don’t. Focus on the target. You’ve done it before, or so you say,” Stone comments.

“That was emotional. This is cold.”

“You’re paying the tax, as promised,” he says flatly. “The tax on Slammer’s foolishness.”

“Okay, and then?”

“After you do this, the tax will be repaid.”

“And the family will be okay?”

“Everyone in the family will be okay.”

I pop a mint. No bad tastes, no bad associations. I’m not going to be suckered into the past.

As we follow him across the bridge, through the prism of stacked-up car windows, I get a glimpse of the victim’s neck. Just like any other commuter’s neck.

“You have to put the good round into him. You have to shoot him squarely in the vest. The adrenaline will be pumping,” Donnato warned.

“I’ll be prepared.”

“Get close. Knock him flat. He knows what’s coming, although I didn’t go into detail about the first shot.”

“Right!” I laughed a high and desperate cackle that was sounding more and more like Stone’s. “Who in their right mind would agree to be a walking target?”

Donnato: “A man with a guilty conscience.”

Waiting makes the tension in my chest unbearable. We sit in the truck, watching the dashboard clock. Dick Stone is running his game, and we are running ours. There are agents in the in-laws’ house and in the house next door. Those females with the empty strollers are undercovers.

I study the Wilkins’ house, the tacky hacienda that we raided in the dark, marking the curve in the bushes where I’ll make the switch. I fix it in my mind. For reassurance, I think about Donnato calling the shots from the stakeout. Stone is calmly smoking a cigar. He’s been on stakeout, too.

At 8:06 p.m. Laumann appears at the front door. A light goes on above it, signaling all is ready. He is carrying a tennis racket and wearing white. This is going to make a big mess. Stone and I pull on our woolen masks. He hands me the Colt.45 and I unlock the car door.

With a thousand hidden eyes upon me, I have never felt so alone. I walk half a dozen steps and start up the driveway, everything still and glittering and clear. My heart is hammering — more than hammering: It’s closing off my mind. I pass the crucial point in front of the bushes. I turn to block Stone’s view and switch the magazines, slipping the live one into the pocket of my black cargo pants, while all the time my legs keep marching forward, and Laumann in his whites keeps coming toward me in the precise evening light, floating, as if he is already dead.

His eyes meet mine. Behind the glasses, there is nothing but terror. They had to shove him out the door. Both of us have been pushed together by our respective sides — the bride in black and the groom in white — to meet in middle of this surreal driveway, a doomed blood wedding.

“ANIMAL KILLER!”

My voice comes from some distant gravel pit. I raise the gun with both hands, plant my knees, sight, and fire.

The first shot throws him backward. He’s down. I run up close. The shot was good; he is unhurt, squinting his eyes and twitching and stuttering, “No, no, no, no!” as I stand over him and fire. Two, three, four, five. The squibs inside his clothes go off, red fountains against the white.

Dick Stone’s blood bomb is a wee-wee compared to this.

I am busting back toward the getaway car, but here comes Stone, running hard, passing me in the opposite direction.

“What the hell?”

“Get in!”

I continue toward the car. Stone is in the driveway. He’s going to finish him off! But on cue, there are screams and people running. Now Stone is back, the car door slams, and we’re gone.

I’m shouting, “What the hell ? What was that ?”

He coolly steers around the corner. “A good shooter never leaves his brass. You can only make that mistake once.”

Stone opens the fingers of his right hand to reveal the five bullet casings that were ejected from the pistol.

An ambulance driven by FBI agents has pulled up and loaded the blood-soaked deputy state director onto a gurney. At the same time, agents are storming the back door, getting the family out. There will be TV news stories, an obituary, and a funeral, but by then the Laumann family will be safely relocated in the witness protection program, where they will live undercover for the rest of their lives.

Everything goes like clockwork.

Four pug puppies will always cause a hullabaloo, even in West Hollywood. When Rooney Berwick takes his babies walking, some tourist will always shout, “How cute are they ? I have a pug, too!” What are you supposed to say to that?

Across from the cobalt blue shell of the Pacific Design Center is a neighborhood park with a small open field that provides a clear patch of sky — not an easy spot to find in the heart of L.A. So if you saw a loner — late fifties, wearing a black T-shirt, pants with a lot of pockets, and thick-soled combat boots — camped out in the middle of the field, pouring water into a collapsible bowl for four panting pugs, that would be Rooney Berwick, getting ready for a call on the satellite phone to his old buddy Dick Stone.

Dead cases are kept in a room-size automated drum in the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. For two days Mike Donnato moves files around a track, like the clothes at your dry cleaner’s, grabbing at whatever fragments might remain of a case in the seventies codenamed “Turquoise.” It was a failed operation, in which the Bureau targeted a series of armored car robberies thought to be linked to radical students at the University of Arizona who were allegedly part of the Weather Underground. Dick Stone was the rookie uc — short hair and creases in his jeans — who infiltrated the campus coffeehouse. Strangely, none of the radicals, who nicknamed him “the Fed,” wished to share their plans for the revolution.

The Bureau went high-tech, bringing in another young buck from Los Angeles, a whiz-kid technician named Rooney Berwick (the photo ID shows him thin-faced and detached, a hundred pounds lighter), who installed listening devices on the armored cars. Three weeks later, arrests were made of two drivers with unchecked criminal records, who had conspired to stage “robberies” with the local bad guys.

The Weather Underground had nothing to do with it.

Intrigued, Donnato runs the full sweep on Rooney: personnel reports, bank accounts, phone records, traffic tickets, pharmacy prescriptions. A picture emerges of a highly intelligent, socially isolated individual, who lives with his mother in the same Hollywood apartment complex in which he grew up, apparently addicted to painkillers, which he has been getting from five different doctors.