Robert Ferrigno - The wake-up

"My sidekick," said Pinto. "I like that."

"Knock that off, Pinto," said Mellon. "I ain't nobody's sidekick."

"No harm done." Weezer slowly turned his back on them, slid the door open. The music pounded around them. "I'm going to go back to work, and let you two be on your way. We'll just call this whole thing a misunder-"

Mellon unloaded both barrels into Weezer's back, hurled him into the bathroom. He looked at Pinto, waved at the smoke and spray. "I truly do hate that song."

Thorpe heard Hathaway coming a block away, the full-size Ford 4?4 pulling into the parking lot, bouncing over the speed bumps, glass packs trumpeting as Hathaway pumped the accelerator. The metallic blue truck was tricked out with oversize blackwalls, gold-flecked chrome wheels, and matching chrome bed rails, bumpers, and mirrors. A decal beside the gas tank showed a cartoon bad boy pissing onto a Chevy insignia. He revved the engine again as Thorpe opened the door.

"Subtle ride, Danny," said Thorpe, stepping up into the cab. It smelled of weed.

Hathaway peeled out of the parking lot before Thorpe was completely inside. Thorpe banged his head, hanging on with one hand as Hathaway cackled, gave it more gas.

"I missed you, too, asshole," said Thorpe, buckling himself in. At the small of his back, he felt the 9-mm semiauto clipped to his belt. He had been carrying since he talked to Ray Bishop and found out who Clark and Missy really were.

"You really missed me, you would have got in touch sooner." Hathaway downshifted, the fingers of his right hand caging the devil's-head floor shift knob. Lean and hard as a roofing nail, he wore a WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? tank top, shorts, and huaraches. Hathaway had been in Thorpe's four-man Delta Force squad. He was much younger than Thorpe, moody and high-strung, the only member other than Thorpe to survive. After their courts-martial, Thorpe had gotten Billy to take him into the shop, but the pace of operations was too slow for Hathaway, and his drug habit had flared up. When Billy cut him loose, Hathaway had hired on with the DEA, which always needed deep-cover field agents, and a minor drug problem was part of the job description. Hathaway had flourished at DEA; he could have moved inside to a desk, could have run his own string of informants, but he preferred the street, and the excuse it gave him to play the part.

They cruised the outskirts of Little Saigon, a community of recent Southeast Asian immigrants who had transformed the former white-bread inland slum into a bustling high-density community of minimalls and backyard vegetable gardens. The street signs were all bilingual now, and most of the high school valedictorians had last names that were unpronounceable to the older residents.

"You talked to Billy lately?" asked Hathaway, watching a couple of pretty Vietnamese girls in shorts and crop tops. "Fucker won't even return my calls."

"What's the matter, you tired of your job?"

"Too much paperwork." Hathaway sniffed. "I hear Billy's gone into business for himself. Maybe you could put in a good word for me."

"It would be a waste of a word."

Hathaway smiled, his teeth white and shiny as fresh dice. Hathaway might let everything else go, but he was fastidious about his oral hygiene. Thorpe remembered the two of them dug into the tree line of a Colombian mountainside, hunkered down for almost a week, waiting to spring an ambush, wet and cold the whole time. Thorpe had shivered and kept quiet, while Hathaway had chewed sugarless Dentyne and jabbered about dental caries and gingivitis and the need to floss after every meal, until Thorpe had threatened to knock his incisors out.

Thorpe checked the side-view mirror. "You said you could fill me in about the local meth scene."

"You have to admire Vietnamese people." Hathaway nodded at an old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of a noodle shop. "They have discipline, a sense of order. You drive down the street in Santa Ana, there's trash all over the sidewalk. Huntington Beach is even worse. Surfers, Frank, they want the ocean pristine, but you walk into one of their cribs, you better wear your hip waders. The Vietnamese, they're not afraid of soap and water."

Thorpe checked the side-view mirror again. It was the day after Gina and Douglas Meachum had left for Hawaii. Thorpe wondered how the second honeymoon was going, wondered if Meachum had called the blonde yet, waiting until Gina was in the shower. Maybe he had learned his lesson. Learned it without Thorpe's help. Thorpe had twelve days to make sure that they were safe when they came back home. Time enough. If Thorpe got lucky again, the Engineer would be at the screening of Shock Waves tonight. He was out there in cyberspace, circling in the darkness; the smell of blood and money kept him close, but it might be the Engineer's love of oddball movies that forced him into a mistake. A man's passions were always his weakness.

"Asian women, they are the absolute best." Hathaway slowed, checked out a slim, well-dressed woman stepping out of a black Lexus. "No tits, though. If the Vietnamese had tits, I'd marry the whole country."

"Let's talk meth, Danny."

"What's your interest in the wonderful world of speed?"

"There's a married couple distributing chemicals out of Newport-"

"Clark the shark? He and Missy are the only ones who fit that description." Hathaway waited for confirmation, shrugged. "Clark moves high-quality meth, and designer pharmaceuticals he comes up with himself. Himself. Only does about fifteen, twenty million dollars a year, but the man's a regular Thomas Alva Edison… if Edison'd been a dope fiend." He looked at Thorpe. "You don't want to mess with him."

"That's what everybody tells me." Thorpe checked the mirror again. "There's a white Pathfinder that's been trailing us for the last mile and not doing a good job of it. Young white guy with a goatee behind the wheel. Couple of others with him."

Hathaway glanced at the rearview, then popped open the dash, revealed a.357 Magnum lying among the fast-food wrappers and catsup packs. "Why don't you snap off a few rounds, see how committed they are?"

Thorpe closed the dash. "You burned these yokels?"

"Sold them a thousand hits of Midol last week." Hathaway ran a red light. "They seemed to be under the impression it was ecstasy."

The Pathfinder pulled into oncoming traffic, raced through the intersection after them, almost hit a Cadillac.

Thorpe tightened his seat belt as Hathaway made a hard right onto a side street, then veered through an alley, tires screeching. He cut through a car wash on the next block, took a one-way street the wrong way, raced through another alley, and headed in the opposite direction. Thorpe's fingers hurt from hanging on.

"We're clear," said Hathaway. "You could have backed them off with a couple shots from the Magnum, saved my tires, but hey, no hard feelings."

"What do you mess around with this petty shit for?"

"It's not the money, Frank; it's the principle of the thing."

Hathaway thought he was being clever, but Thorpe knew it was the truth. Danny saw the world as two circles. One very tiny circle contained his friends, with barely room inside for Thorpe and one or two others. The other circle contained everyone else on the planet. His friends could count on Hathaway to keep his word, and to keep his silence. The rest of the world had reason to worry. Casual rip-offs, short-weighting his busts for the DEA, strong-arming crack dealers for their bankroll and their stash, it was all the same agenda to him: whatever, whenever, whoever.

"One of these days, some kid you burned for a few hundred dollars is going to kill you."

"Like you're Mr. Safe and Sane. You're the guy asking about Clark and Missy, so tell me about your PTA meetings and your 401(k) and your high-fiber diet. Edge City, Frank. You're as fucked-up as me. You just hide it better."