Revolution No. 9 (25 page)

T
raffic moved at a crawl along Highway 1 through Bodega Bay, choked by the thousands of pedestrians and hundreds of cars parked illegally along the roadside. A forty-foot Bounder RV edged along in the stream, another bewildered and frightened tourist trying to get through this wild mess. But then it pulled over into a space conveniently vacated by two cars, just as it arrived. The passing crowd swirled around the big rig like water around a stone, but not without offering up plenty of jeering, hostile glances, and occasional raised fingers to this symbol of leisure and wealth.

Shielded behind the smoked windows, Freeboot watched them stonily, with the mixture of pity and contempt that rare men like him—men of great vision and ability—had always held for society's losers, whose asses had first to be kicked into realizing the power they held, and then into using it. In fact, the RV was just the opposite of what it seemed—a com
mand post for an army that didn't yet know it existed. And the first battle in the war was coming together out there on the streets right now.

The RV's parking spot, secured early that morning by the
maquis
, was a vantage point on high ground, with a clear view of the marina below. Within a couple of minutes, Freeboot saw a California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop approaching, navigating slowly but steadily through the throng. Tension and disdain were obvious in the faces he passed, but no one was ready to take on The Man.

Yet.

Freeboot moved to the RV's passenger door and opened it. Anyone who saw him would have taken him for a middle-aged tourist. He looked completely different than he had three months ago. He had spent a lot of that time in Panama.
That
was a great place—mescal, cocaine, pretty women, and plastic surgeons who didn't ask questions. His cheeks and nose had been thickened, a chin implant added, and his ears angled forward to give him a bearlike look. His hair and beard were short, white, and well trimmed. He wore a padded shirt and a fanny pack across his belly to accentuate a paunch. But underneath it, his ferally strong body was the same.

The cop pulled up to the door, straddling his big BMW motorcycle. His brawny forearms and biceps stretched the short sleeves of his tan shirt. A Smith & Wesson .40-caliber automatic rode high on his right hip. He wore knee-high black boots, tight black gloves, and aviator sunglasses.

Behind the glasses, Freeboot knew, Hammerhead's eyes were bloodshot and crazed with meth.

The passing crowd drifted away from this exchange—a cop probably checking on the safety of the RV's well-off passengers, maybe offering them an escort out of here.

“It's going to start real soon,” Freeboot said quietly. “Get
it done, and ride out like a son of a bitch. You'll be gone before they know what happened.”

Hammerhead's lips were set in a tight line—the tough look of a cop in a tense situation. But they moved in a sudden tremor, and a little froth of saliva spilled out of one corner of his mouth.

“You talked to her again?” he said.

Freeboot assented, a slow, assured raising of his head.

“Just a little while ago,” he said. “Marguerite's had some wrong ideas, but that's all over. She'll be waiting when you get back.”

Hammerhead's corded forearms flexed as he put the bike in gear and accelerated away.

Taxman stepped from the RV's rear section, carrying a long nylon duffel bag, the kind that athletes used for equipment. Inside it was a Remington model 700 .308-caliber rifle with a Leupold scope. He lowered the passenger-side window a few inches and raised the gun to his shoulder, keeping all of it but the scope inside the bag, slipping the tip of the muzzle out through a slit and bracing it in the window opening. The crosshairs found Hammerhead's white helmet and followed it.

“You going to be able to pick him out?” Freeboot said.

“As long as everybody's where they're supposed to be.” Taxman stashed the bag in a cabinet.

“If they're not,” Freeboot said, “get creative.”

He kicked off his shoes and stripped off the padded shirt, replacing it with a Kevlar vest.

 

Inside the RV's bathroom, Shrinkwrap was putting the finishing touches on her young lover's disguise, kneeling before him and dabbing Mehron stage makeup on his face while he sat on the closed toilet lid.

“Perfect,” she said, holding up a compact mirror in front of him.

Glenn Monks stared into it, looking like he had stage fright. His lips parted, showing his blistered teeth and gums.

“Don't be scared, baby,” she said softly. “I'm very proud of you. I know how much it's hurt you, everybody thinking you're just a computer geek. Today, you make full
maquis
. Remember, as soon as it starts, clean up with these”—she tapped the packet of moist towelettes in his shirt pocket—“and get your ass back here.”

He nodded, swallowing dryly.

“What's the first thing you're going to say when you get up there?” she asked in a teasing voice.

“People, y'all
listen
to me.” His voice was shaky, and it cracked.

“Don't panic, try it again,” she coaxed. “You're
cool
, baby, you're the coolest rapper I've ever heard. Just be
you
.”

“People, y'all
listen
to me,” he cried out, with strained force. “We here today to talk about gettin'
back
what The Man been takin'
away
from us.”

“
Perfect
,” she said again, rubbing his thighs through his pants, comically baggy jeans worn with the waistband just above his pubis and the cuffs dragging on the ground.

Her hands moved to the zipper. “Now lean back and close your eyes,” she whispered. “I'm going to give my brave soldier a good-luck present.”

A few minutes later, she walked with him to the RV's cab and watched him slip out into the crowd. It hurt. He had touched that deep, sweet spot in her. But Freeboot was right—the meth had been getting to him, making him petulant, unreliable, tiresome to be around, and a risk if he got caught. It was a hard truth of all successful politics that sometimes, individuals had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

There were plenty of other lovely boys out there, younger ones, with bright white smiles.

S
triding back to the marina, Monks was jolted by the fear that it had caught on fire. What looked like a wave of flame was sweeping through the crowd.

Then he realized that he was seeing several hundred garish T-shirts, colored nuclear sunset orange, worn by the oncoming partyers.

A closer look stunned him even more. The T-shirts' central logo was a cartoonishly ugly vulture with an evil grin, pinning the neck of a squealing lamb with one taloned foot, while ripping out its guts with the other. Above that, in large bold letters, was printed:
THE BIRDS IS BACK, BABY
!

And below it, bloodred and shaped like jagged lightning flashes driving into the scorched earth, were the characters
REV
# 9
.

“Are you seeing these T-shirts?” he said into his hidden microphone.

“There's cars with trunkfuls of them—they're handing them out free,” Pietowski growled. “The caps, too.”

Monks hadn't yet noticed those, but now he saw that most of the T-shirt wearers were also sporting dark blue or black stocking caps, pulled down low over foreheads and ears, hiphop style.

“Now they all fucking look alike,” Pietowski said. “We're going to disperse them. Watch yourself, this could get rough.”

Monks was starting to hear the faint, faraway sound of sirens over the clamor of the many-thousand-limbed beast that prowled around him. The crowd heard it, too, and the noise level dropped as people turned to look toward Highway 1. Seaward, the throbbing pulse of helicopters thickened as they moved closer. Another swift, purposeful Coast Guard cutter was approaching from the direction of San Francisco. The local police and sheriffs, helmeted and wearing riot gear, were getting out of their cars, trying to start moving the crowd off the marina and back toward the highway. Knots of confrontation were forming, the partyers reacting with anger and taunts.

“People!”

Monks swung toward the sound, shouted over a megaphone. It came from a young black man wearing a stocking cap and one of the garish orange T-shirts. He had climbed up on top of a fish-processing shed at Spud Point, where the crowd was thickest.

Holding the megaphone to his lips, he yelled again.

“People, y'all
listen
to me. We here today to talk about gettin'
back
what The Man been takin'
away
from us.”

Monks absorbed instantaneous and disturbing impressions. The accent didn't sound quite right—it had the ring of a white man trying to imitate black speech. The voice was high-pitched, strained—

And yet, even over the megaphone, familiar.

“Oh,
Christ
,” he breathed, and took a running step to throw his arms around his living son. Then he stopped just as fast and hovered, breathing hard, torn between the need to get to Glenn and the fear of what was going to happen to him when the police got him.

“Now I want y'all to look around you,” Glenn called out. He pranced on his perch, starting to gain confidence. “There is strength in
numbers
. Yeah! Look how
many
of us there are.”

As more heads turned toward him and the crowd's noise quieted further, the sirens and thunder of the chopper rotors rose, as if a giant volume knob was being turned up. The Coast Guard patrol boat was discharging armed men at the harbor's mouth, and the sheriffs' helicopter was landing on the headlands to the west, dropping what looked like a SWAT team. Red and blue lights were lining Highway 1, popping like flashbulbs at a celebrity wedding.

“Now, when The Man put on his
uniform
, he think it give him the right to walk all over us. But when we put on
our
uniform—” Glenn pulled the T-shirt away from his skinny chest and patted himself on the head in demonstration—“well, he don't know who we
be
. So that give
us
some rights, too. Y'all see where I'm coming from?”

“Cease and desist!” a much louder voice interrupted. This one was coming through an amplified microphone mounted on a Sonoma County sheriff's truck, not just a handheld bullhorn. “This is a police order. You with the megaphone—come down and walk forward with your hands up. People in the crowd, start dispersing peacefully.”

“You think they gonna arrest us all?” Glenn shouted scornfully. “Where they gonna put us? The jails are already full, baby! Full of people who smoked a joint, or stole some food 'cause they was starving! While the motherfuckers
who stole your jobs and your homes and your
dignity
, they flying around in private jets! Yeah!”

A different kind of murmur was starting to rise from the crowd, with a tone of angry assent. Monks saw several clenched fists raised into the air.

“This is an unlawful assembly,” the police microphone bellowed. “I
repeat
, disperse yourselves peacefully.”

The cops on foot were shoving their way toward Glenn now, but the crowd was shoving back. Nightsticks started to flail. Monks fought his way along, his hesitation gone—in a panic to get to Glenn and drag him out of this insanity.

“Andrew, that's my son up there. That's Glenn!” Monks yelled into his microphone. “I need help getting him safe!”

“Ten-four that,” Pietowski said. “We're coming.”

Monks was twenty yards away from the shed when a California Highway Patrolman on a motorcycle came charging through the tangled mass of people, running straight into whoever got in his way and kicking them aside. Monks got a glimpse of his bull neck and broad back.

As the cop passed in front of the shed, he slowed and unholstered his pistol, raising it to aim at Glenn.

Monks stared, rigid with disbelief.

Then he yelled, “
No
,” and threw himself forward, grabbing shoulders and handfuls of clothing to claw his way through the crowd.

A man with the look of a biker snarled, “
Watch
it, fucker,” and punched him hard in the side of the head, knocking his sunglasses flying. Monks reeled, tripping over legs—

Hearing the terrible thumps of high-powered gunshots.

When he fought his way to his feet again, Glenn was gone from sight. The motorcycle cop was riding on, waving his pistol. Now people screamed and trampled each other to get out of his path.

And then, a black spiderweb the size of a half-dollar appeared on the back of the cop's white helmet, like an eggshell shattering. It slammed him forward over the careening bike's handlebars.

“Eleven ninety-nine, officer down!” the police microphone roared. “Code Three for all law-enforcement personnel!”

Monks struggled on toward where Glenn had been, now trying to keep from getting knocked down and stomped to raw meat by the fleeing human torrent. People were surging in all directions, even swarming over the marina's moored boats and leaping into the channel. Through the yells and screams around him and the pounding in his own ears, he was aware of more gunfire, and he caught glimpses of shouting cops with raised weapons. A cordon of police had formed around the fallen Highway Patrolman, shielding him from the stampede.

“…return fire!” he heard the microphone boom. “There are snipers in the crowd! Repeat, officers are authorized to return fire!”

Monks made it to the shed where Glenn had been perched and clambered up the webbed iron frame of a derrick to the roof. Two cops were already up there, crouched, swiveling tensely with pistols ready, watching the chaos below.

Glenn lay off to one side, prone and still.

Monks jumped from the derrick onto the roof. Both cops swung to face him, aiming at him with two-handed combat grips.

“Stop right there!” one bellowed.

“That's my son,” Monks shouted, and kept coming.

“I don't give a fuck! Turn around and get out of here.”

“Wait a minute, you saying you know this kid?” the other one said. He yanked his handcuffs from his belt and started toward Monks. “Get down, asshole. On your face, hands behind you—”

“I'm FBI and that man's a doctor!” a hard voice broke in, yelling up at them from below. “Stand back and let him work.”

It was Pietowski, striding toward the shed with a pistol raised in one hand and his FBI badge in the other. He was flanked by two men who looked like undercover agents, dressed like Monks in funky outfits, but also brandishing guns.

The cops on the roof hesitated, looking at each other. Monks pushed past them and dropped to his knees beside Glenn. His fingers smeared the greasy blackface makeup as he checked for vital signs. Glenn was breathing, and the pulse in his carotid artery was faint but steady. There were no obvious wounds. Monks turned him carefully onto his back.

Glenn's half-closed eyes opened a little wider in recognition or surprise. He tried to say something, but only blood came from his mouth, bubbling between his lips.

“Hush,” Monks said. “Don't try to talk.”

He could hear Pietowski behind him, up on the roof now. “This situation's under control,” Pietowski told the two policemen. “You men can get on down and help your buddies.”

“If this guy's really a doctor, he should be taking care of cops, not this maggot,” one muttered.

“With all due respect, officer, you don't know zip minus shit about it,” Pietowski said harshly. “There's still shooters out there. Go find them.”

Monks's fingers located an entry wound in Glenn's chest, below the sternum and a couple of inches to the right. His mouth bleeding almost certainly meant that the bullet had punctured that lung, but the lung hadn't yet collapsed, and there were no indications that his heart or spine had been hit. Monks's hands kept searching over the rest of Glenn's body. He had heard the motorcycle cop fire at least three shots. But there seemed to be no other wounds. Probably, the first round had knocked Glenn spinning away and down, and the others had missed.

He eased the stocking cap off Glenn's head, dreading what he'd find. But both of Glenn's ears, minus the earring, looked just fine.

“How is he?” Pietowski asked.

“Lucky.”

“Paramedics are on their way. We'll get him on a chopper.”

Monks kept his hands on Glenn, reading his instant-by-instant condition through them, automatically making small adjustments—keeping his nostrils clear, loosening his clothing. With good prompt care, Glenn was going to make it.

A team of two paramedics arrived within minutes, carrying a backboard. Monks helped them ease Glenn onto it, and watched them closely as they strapped him down and lowered him to another team, waiting on the ground with a gurney. They seemed competent, but he intended to go with them to the hospital, and he started to follow them off the roof.

Pietowski caught his arm. “There's people lying on the ground who need you here,” he said, pointing at the havoc below.

The crowd was thinning at the marina by now, most of it surging up into town. Monks didn't hear any more gunfire, but there was still plenty of panic. Cars were ramming each other, driving over curbs, through yards, into buildings. The metallic crunch of collisions pierced the air, and shards of splintering glass from windshields and storefronts sprayed out here and there, glittering in the sunlight. Thousands more were fleeing on foot, swarming like locusts along the highway, through the shops and restaurants, up the streets and into the clusters of condos on the hills. Police helicopters hovered close overhead, megaphones bellowing warnings, but it looked like nothing short of napalm could stop the frenzy. At least a dozen people had fallen and were lying motionless or struggling feebly. A couple of them were
wearing police uniforms. Monks remembered that he had heard the words over the police bullhorn:
There are snipers in the crowd
.

The paramedics with Glenn had reached a Life Flight helicopter and were loading him on.

“Don't worry, we're not going to let anything happen to him,” Pietowski said.

Monks nodded, but he knew the bitter truth behind that concern. Glenn was a big prize, the only one the FBI had apprehended so far in connection with the Calamity Jane murders. He was also the best hope they had of tracking down Freeboot.

The nearest of the fallen bodies was the Highway Patrolman who had shot Glenn. Several angry-looking cops were hovering around, and another team of paramedics had arrived, but Monks was quite sure even from a distance that he was dead. The crash had dumped him in an ugly sprawl, with one jackbooted leg still tangled in the handlebars of his bike.

“Stand aside,” Pietowski said again, flashing his badge. “This man's a doctor.” The cops and paramedics moved back.

Monks knelt beside the man who had tried to kill his son. He had been shot twice. He might have survived the round to the helmet, but the second one, just below its rim, was lethal. Monks knew that that was a preferred target of SWAT-team and military snipers—through the spinal cord into the medulla oblongata.

Then he recognized the thick-featured face, and his rage turned to shock.

“This isn't a cop,” he said to Pietowski. “He's one of Freeboot's men. Hammerhead—the one who had that jade pendant.”

Monks was still crouched there, trying to grasp this new insanity, when one of the FBI undercover agents stepped away from the group, pressing his hand against his ear, listening.

Then he yelled, “They spotted a guy with a limp, up on the highway!”

Agents and cops took off running, the younger men at a sprint. Monks and Pietowski followed, lumbering and panting. Other uniformed men with raised weapons were running on Highway 1.

“He's getting into that RV!” someone yelled.

Monks saw the vehicle, a huge white box on wheels, almost the size of a bus. There was no way that it was going anywhere in this jam. Anybody inside it was trapped.

“Attention! Inside the RV!” the megaphone on the sheriff's truck bellowed. “Come out with your hands up!”