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  Thanks, government, I thought, parking Aaron Cody’s seventies muscle wagon in the corner of the lot. Take a bow. Another job well done.

  “Our Lady of Sorrows, indeed,” I mumbled when I saw the food-bank notice on the bulletin board beside the door of the tiny white church.

  The inside of the church was very plain. Definitely not St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but there was something nice about it, something serene. Instead of an organ, there was an old piano beside the altar, currently being played beautifully by a thin, red-haired middle-aged woman.

  “That’s Abigail, the parish secretary,” Seamus said. “Juliana and I better get going. She’s supposed to show us where everything is.”

  “I guess it’s OK,” I grumbled as I looked around at the blue-haired congregation. “Not too many gangbangers around.”

  “Exactly, Dad,” Juliana said, rolling her eyes. “Everyone knows the gangbangers just go to Sunday Mass.”

  I knelt at a pew at the back of the church after they left. I hadn’t been to early-morning Mass during the week in ages.

  I used to go all the time in the months after my wife, Maeve, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Before or after my shift at work, every chance I got, I would head to Holy Name Church, a couple of blocks from our building. The youngest person there by decades, I would sit in the front and pray with everything in me for my wife to somehow be OK, for God to grant me a miracle.

  Because, while people talk about their wife being their better half, Maeve was more like my better three-quarters, my better seven-eighths. She was the saint who’d put our crazy, wonderful family together. Mike, we need to adopt another one, she’d say. And I’d look over at her, at the holy look in her eyes, and I was suddenly the farm boy from The Princess Bride, and it was “As you wish” time.

  But, prayers or no prayers, God wasn’t having any of it. Maeve died almost six months to the day of her cancer diagnosis. It had been years now since she’d passed away, but her spirit was very much alive, and she was still such a source of strength for me.

  “Hey, babe,” I whispered up at the rafters. “What do I do now?”

  The church filled up more than I’d thought it would. In addition to the requisite white-haired old-timers, there were quite a few able-bodied young white and Hispanic men who looked like they worked outside. Praying for work, no doubt. For some hope, I thought, feeling bad for them. I checked my wallet and fished out a twenty to slip into the poor box on the way out.

  It was just before the gospel when a strange guy with a gray ponytail and a scraggly white beard came into the church behind me.

  “Well, what do you know? It’s actually true,” the guy whispered as he climbed into the pew beside me. “Open the door, and here’s the people.”

  I looked him over. With his camouflage hunting anorak over his greasy jeans, and with suspiciously glassy eyes, the old hippie had a very strong resemblance to a homeless person. Or maybe to Nick Nolte about to get a mug shot taken.

  “Welcome to the Hotel California,” I thought, rolling my eyes.

  My cop radar thought Nick Gra-Nolte might pass out or cause some trouble, but as the Mass went on, he knelt when he was supposed to and knew all the prayers. He even knew all the annoying changes in the prayers that the church had just dropped on everyone out of the blue.

  But as I stood to line up for Communion, I couldn’t help noticing what he was carrying at the back of his worn jeans.

  It was a pistol, a Smith amp; Wesson semiauto, not in a holster, just tucked there, happy as you please.

  Peace, love, and a nine millimeter? I thought, my cop radar clicking up to DEFCON 3.

  CHAPTER 19

  I was ready to tackle the guy the whole way up the aisle. As it turned out, nothing happened. I breathed a sigh of relief as the old hippie left right after Communion.

  But, of course, it wasn’t over. Nick Nolte was pretending to read the bulletin board when I went out with Seamus and Juliana ten minutes after the end of Mass.

  What will happen now? I thought, my hand tracing the line of my back where my gun was located. A postservice Wild West gunfight? I mean, give me a break. My blood pressure really didn’t need this.

  “Hi, strangers,” the hippie said, smiling.

  I noticed for the first time that the guy was in pretty good shape-broad shouldered, with big hands. I instinctively put myself between him and Juliana.

  “Nice service,” the guy said. “Are you guys new to the parish?”

  “No,” I answered for Seamus. “We’re just passing through.”

  “Passing through?” the hippie said. “In Aaron Cody’s station wagon?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” I said. “I got one for you. You always carry in church?”

  “Carry?” the hippie said, his bleary eyes squinting. “Oh, you mean the ol’ pistola here,” he said, giggling as he patted the small of his back after a beat. “Oh, sure. All us rootin’ tootin’ cowboys up here like our Second Amendment rights. That goes without saying. How about you? You always carry in church?”

  “Get in the car, guys,” I said to Juliana and Seamus as I walked over to the still-giggling weirdo. Despite my initial paranoia and the guy’s roscoe, I could tell he was just a high California goofball.

  “It’s been really fun talking to you, bro,” I said, smiling as I stared into his red eyes, “but don’t you think it’s time for you to grab a bag of Doritos and go watch Jerry Springer?”

  He burst out laughing at that.

  “I like you. You’re funny,” he said, going into his anorak pocket.

  “Tight-lipped, too,” he said, removing a fat joint and lighting it with a Zippo as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He blew some rancid smoke in my direction.

  “Around here, tight-lipped works just fine,” he said. “Actually, I was just trying to be neighborly. The priest’s accent reminds me of my grandpap. I’m Irish, too. They call me McMurphy. There’s a little bar down the road a bit called Buffalo Gil’s. Why don’t we meet up? I’ll buy you a Guinness.”

  I stared at the lit weirdo, wondering why this kind of crap always happened to me. I mean, talking to drugged crazy people was fun, but I had cows to milk.

  “Sounds like a plan, McMurphy, but I actually have a better idea,” I said as I turned to walk toward the car.

  “Yeah, what’s that?” my new dope-smoking hippie friend wanted to know.

  “How about we don’t meet up, but we just tell everyone we did?” I said as I climbed into the station wagon.

  He stared at me blankly as I started the engine, but just as I pulled past him, he suddenly got it.

  In my rearview mirror, I watched as the nut broke up, laughing in the empty parking lot, the joint in his hand falling to the gravel as he slapped at his greasy thigh.

  CHAPTER 20

  Vida Gomez kept the stolen Cadillac Escalade at a steady sixty as they rolled east on the San Bernardino Expressway in El Monte, east of downtown LA.

  They were nearing their exit when a motorcycle gang roared past out of nowhere. Completely startled, she cursed violently as a dozen black-leather-clad motorcyclists on big Jap bikes screamed around both sides of her SUV like a fusillade of just-missing guided missiles.

  Assholes, she thought, seething, as one of the devil-may-care speeding bikers popped a wheelie. She could have shot one of them. All of them, in fact. The thing she hated most on this earth was to be snuck up on.

  Trying to roll the tension out of her neck, she glanced back at the six buzz-cut men seated behind her to see if any of them had witnessed her blow her cool. But they were calm, oblivious, half of them dozing as usual.

  Though all of Perrine’s handpicked cartel soldiers had obeyed her so far, she never once forgot that they were killers of distinction from a place where killers were a dime a dozen. Any sign of weakness, even the slightest hint of fear, could be fatal in her line of work.

  What was up with her today? she wondered. It definitely wasn’t li
ke her to be so jumpy. This morning she’d woken up with a bad feeling. It was something in the air that wouldn’t quit, a brooding sensation that something unpleasant was about to occur.

  Or was she just being paranoid? Having a bout of stage fright? She didn’t know. The only thing she knew was, this was definitely the part she hated the most, the space between the plan and the execution.

  The latest task given to her elite squad was to deal with an Asian gang out of El Monte called the Triumph Dragons. The Vietnamese gang, though quite small, ran one of the busiest docks out at the Port of Los Angeles, down in Long Beach. Perrine had made a deal with them to let a large shipment through, but at the last second, the Dragons had reneged, causing the seizure by the US Coast Guard of an entire shipping container filled to the brim with premium Colombian heroin.

  Manuel had not been pleased. Yesterday afternoon, the cartel boss had forwarded to Vida a very simple instruction by encrypted text message.

  Slay the dragons, his text had said. Each and every one.

  She weaved through the dense El Monte neighborhood until she found the location she was looking for, a deserted parking lot behind a shuttered supermarket on Cogswell Road.

  The young man slouching in the passenger seat beside her loudly slurped at the last of his McDonald’s chocolate shake as they came to a stop.

  “You’re going to do this now, right, Jorge? Not having any second thoughts on me, right?” she said in Spanish.

  “Please,” Jorge said, looking at her, his brown eyes soft in his even softer face.

  Youthful appearance aside, Jorge was an up-and-comer in the cartel’s newest ally, Mara Salvatrucha, the brutal Hispanic gang otherwise known as MS-13.

  Jorge had dealt to the Dragons before, so his job had been to set up a dope deal. Five kilos of coke at the cut-rate price of $12K per. There weren’t any drugs, of course, and the only thing cut-rate was going to be the lives of the Vietnamese gangbangers, as soon as they showed up.

  Vida looked out on the El Monte neighborhood as they waited. Low stucco houses, palm trees, chain-link fences. California shabby, minus the chic. Above it all, dark clouds rolled against the fast-fading gold of the sky.

  More waiting, she thought, feeling like a bubble about to pop. It was driving her mad.

  Vida sat bolt upright as Jorge’s phone finally rattled in the silence.

  “Is it them?” she said hopefully.

  “It’s them,” Jorge said with a nod. “They just got off the expressway.”

  CHAPTER 21

  At Jorge’s confirmation, the inside of the truck was immediately filled with the meticulous, oiled click and snap of guns being loaded and readied.

  Music to my ears, Vida thought.

  Vida put a hand to her brow. Even with the AC jacked, she was sweating, amped up beyond belief. She had to slow things down and concentrate. She counted backward from ten as she carefully dried her hands and face with a McDonald’s napkin.

  Then she reached back and accepted her trusty MGP-84, which the cartel soldier behind her handed up.

  “Let’s go over it one more time,” Vida said to Jorge, who was nervously playing with the door latch.

  The young man sighed.

  “I roll up, make nice, make sure the gang’s all there,” he said quickly. “Then I whistle over to you like I want you to bring the stuff, right?”

  “Then duck, Jorge,” Vida said, showing him her Peruvian machine pistol as she draped a motherly arm over his shoulder.

  The rough men behind them in the SUV chuckled as they polished gun sights and tightened weapon straps over their burly forearms.

  “You don’t want to forget that last part, homey,” one of them said in a low voice as Jorge finally swung open the door.

  Jorge was sitting up on the abandoned supermarket’s concrete loading dock as a car pulled into the lot. The new black Audi A4 with tinted everything pulled up directly in front of Jorge, and three Asians immediately got out, leaving the driver behind the wheel.

  Vida scanned the men quickly with a pair of binoculars. The young, heavily tattooed Vietnamese thugs might have hidden handguns, she thought, but that was it. So far, so bad. For them, at least.

  Vida peered closer at the tallest of them. She quickly looked at some pictures on her phone, comparing. Well, what do you know? A stroke of good luck. The tall forty-something Asian with the handsome, angular face looked an awful lot like Giang Truong, the head Triumph Dragon honcho who, after the port fiasco, had personally told Manuel to go fuck himself. Manuel said if they took out Truong, their crew would split a bonus of $50K!

  All of her anxiety had been for nothing. Her and her superstitions. Everything was coming together just fine.

  Jorge wasn’t through with the hand slapping when it started. From one of the cruddy houses across the street came a loud bang. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was a group of large men wearing blue Windbreakers, running across the street toward them. At the same time, two marked and two unmarked cop cars rolled out from behind the supermarket like they were some kind of circus trick.

  “Everyone on the ground!” a bullhorn cried as the first cop car raced toward them. “This is the Los Angeles Police Department! Turn off your engines and exit your vehicles! We have you completely surrounded!”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Vida cried as she watched the cops advance and the world end.

  When she turned back toward the loading dock, she watched as the Triumph Dragons piled into the already-moving Audi. The sports car squealed past the SUV, almost hitting it as it headed east.

  They were running. Good idea, Vida thought. Jorge wasn’t completely in the car when she slammed the SUV into drive and the accelerator into the floor.

  She almost collided head-on with the first cop car as she roared out of the lot, heading west. In her rearview, she could see one of the unmarked cars fishtail and hammer after her, its blue light bubbling. It must have been some kind of souped-up copmobile, she thought, because after a minute, it really started gaining on them.

  I can’t have that, Vida thought, instantly taking a left in the middle of the house-lined block.

  The SUV lurched and almost tipped as it skidded sideways over a grassless lawn. Its big, screeching wheels caught a driveway, and then the front air bags went off in two loud, white puffs as the grille smashed through a chain-link fence into a backyard.

  Wood crunched as they blurred through a play set and another wooden fence. Then they swerved alongside another stucco shitbox, veered onto another driveway, and were bouncing over the curb onto the street opposite the first.

  Vida checked her mirrors. The following cop car was nowhere, at least for the moment. Wheels smoking, the big-block, four-hundred-horsepower engine howling, she hooked a right at the next corner, back toward the expressway.

  Less than half a minute later, they’d made it. They turned another corner, and the on-ramp to the westbound San Bernardino was right there. In a minute, they would be on it and gone.

  Instead of gunning it, though, Vida, biting her lip in concentration, pulled over on the shoulder under the expressway overpass beside the on-ramp and put the SUV into park.

  “What are you waiting for?” Jorge said, banging on the dashboard. “Are you out of your mind? The cops are coming! I don’t want to go to jail. We need to get the hell out of here. Let’s go!”

  Vida shook her head as she lifted her phone.

  “Calm down. I won’t tell you twice,” she said. “You let me handle the cops. We can still get this done.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Everyone in the suv except Vida turned and looked back as the cop car that was following them screamed past on the perpendicular street behind them. Then they watched as it hit its brakes and swung around.

  “They saw us! How about now? Can we go now?” Jorge wanted to know.

  Vida shook her head.

  “Out, men,” she said calmly. “Lay down suppressing fire.”
/>   “Suppressing fire?!” Jorge yelled.

  Vida placed her machine pistol to the young man’s temple.

  “That means you, too, Jorge. Time to grow some hair on that chest. Get the fuck out of this truck!”

  In the falling dusk, in the middle of the busy city street, the cartel hit team poured out of the vehicle and immediately opened fire on the approaching Crown Victoria. Against the iron-and-concrete tunnel of the overpass, the sudden rattling blast of the half-dozen fully automatic AR-15s and AK-47s going off at once was pants wetting. The oncoming cop car swung sideways and halted in the middle of the street, its perforated hood smoking, its windshield torn to shreds.

  Still the cartel soldiers fired, without letup. Their shooting stance was textbook, rifle stocks tucked high in the shoulder as they smoothly squeezed off round after round after round.

  Despite the war thundering around her, Vida’s eyes were wide open as she put the SUV into drive.

  Seconds later, the Triumph Dragons’ Audi A4 appeared in the cross street in front of her, from the east. It was headed directly toward the on-ramp on her left, like she’d predicted. She stomped the accelerator into the floor.

  She timed it perfectly. The Cadillac Escalade plowed directly into the side of the small, speeding Audi in a horrible crunch of metal. The Audi, spinning in a dog squeal of rubber, hit two other cars waiting at the light before it came to a stop.

  Amid the automatic gunfire and screaming citizens, Vida exited from the now-smoking Escalade with the machine pistol. The Triumph Dragons in the crumpled Audi were moaning as she walked over the broken glass. She emptied a clip into the wreckage, then reloaded and gave each man another short burst in the head just to be sure.

  She dropped the machine pistol and took out her phone. People who had been waiting at the light abandoned their vehicles. Between the pauses in the gunfire behind her, she could hear sirens approaching in the distance. Then the phone was finally answered.