In the back woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, there is a small, winding road that does not appear on any map, and which few have ever traveled. It winds around over the tops of the hills, through lush groves scented by pine trees, where white-tailed deer leap gracefully over fallen logs and squirrels make crunching sounds on the thick mat of dried pine needles. On nights of the full moon, when spring is in her glory, stars sparkle brightly in the inky black sky, and millions of fireflies wink in the clean, crisp air, signaling each other with secret tribal semaphores that are not taught to outsiders.
Into this idyllic scene rumbles a man who, in another life, was known as Dan Winslow, but is now called, simply, Brother Daniel. He is a strange figure to see out here in the forest, so his appearance warrants the effort of description. He is riding an ancient BSA Lightning Rocket, which in itself is unusual. But wait, there’s more. His head is shaved clean like a Tibetan monk’s, and he has a long, stringy Oriental-style goatee that flaps in the wind over his left shoulder. He is wearing a hooded cloak made of brown burlap that also flaps straight out behind him as he rides. He is in his 40s, tall and lean, and in his clear blue eyes, abundant peace resides.
Brother Daniel never decides where to go. In fact, he doesn’t even know where he is going; at least not in the logical and intellectual sense with which most of us use the word “know.” He knows where to go the same way the fish know where to swim; he doesn’t have to think about it or rationalize it, he just knows. So now he heads south, and he knows that Buzzard will be there, because that’s what is supposed to happen at that particular time and place. Brother Daniel is plugged into the consciousness of the universe in a way few modern men can comprehend, and as such, his intuition is never wrong.
Dan Winslow had hated his life. It was to be expected, since he was living out the American dream. He had one wife, two kids, eight credit cards (each with a staggering debt), two $50,000 cars, a $500,000 house, complete with a breathtaking mortgage, and, of course, the old Beezer, which he hadn’t ridden in years. He was post-modern, fast-paced, career-oriented, upwardly mobile, highly fashionable and completely burned out. At the age of 39, he was gaining weight, losing hair and beginning to have creeping doubts about the relative value of things like foyers with cathedral ceilings and 7-foot-high chandeliers that are visible from the street. But, like the song says, there were planes to catch and bills to pay, and Dan wasn’t a man who was overly given to thoughtful introspection. Had he been such a man, he might have given some serious thought to the subject of omens. But Dan Winslow had no time for omens because they were neither big nor shiny nor even terribly expensive (or so he thought), and therefore would, in all probability, not impress the neighbors. Which was a pity, really, because at that very moment, one mother of an omen was teetering, like the sword of Damocles, right above his head. Had he been taught to see such things, it might, in fact, have saved him quite a lot of trouble.This particular omen took the innocuous form of a letter-sized manila envelope. Its upper left corner was emblazoned with the crest of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Just below the crest was the Harrisburg return address of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Dan tore open the envelope with that vague sense of dread that is sadly familiar to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of official correspondence from the state. Inside was a letter informing him that he, Daniel P. Winslow, had 0 traffic tickets outstanding, and that he faced the imminent loss of his driver’s license unless he immediately remitted the sum of 00 dollars and 00 cents. For a moment he couldn’t quite believe it; he just stood there, staring incredulously at the Kafkaesque letter, mouth open like a dying fish. After spending an infuriating hour lost in the bureau’s labyrinthine automated phone system, he was put in touch with a clerk at the Montgomery County Court House in Norristown. The clerk assured him that the computer error that had generated the fantastically absurd letter would be corrected at once, and Dan gave the matter no further thought. An official had assured him; why would he doubt it?
But the executives had an understanding with the cops in the city, as most were heavy contributors to the FOP. Dan’s shiny new Mercedes was like a signal flare; it hinted at secret connections to sources of money and power that no smart cop should ever cross. So Dan wasn’t overly concerned when he saw the flashing red and blue lights in his rear view mirror; hell, he didn’t even think that they were directed toward him. He figured that the cop just wanted him to get out of the way so that he could go get the real bad guys. It wasn’t until the cop ran right up on his rear bumper that his befuddled mind formed the thought that there was nobody else, he was the only thing on this goddamn evil road.
The gray steel guardrail looked surreal, almost like a video game, as Dan carefully eased his way onto the shoulder. A minor misunderstanding, he thought. I’ll just have a little talk with the good officer and straighten this whole thing out. Dan turned his dome light on, hit the button that rolled the driver-side window down and waited for the cop to approach. He didn’t have to wait long. The cop looked apprehensive at first, but his face relaxed once he had sized up his adversary and decided that Dan was probably not dangerous.
“License and registration, please.”
“Just a minute, officer, I think there’s been a little misunderstanding. A little- heh heh- yes, what I mean to say is…”
“Sir, I need to see your license and registration now.” Dirty Harry voice, heavy sheriff-at-sundown overtones.
Dan couldn’t quite believe it. He, Daniel P. Winslow III, was being ordered around like a common criminal, by this kid, who looked to be all of 21…fresh out of the academy, with his hairless cheeks and his I-am-the-law swagger. “Young man,” he said, “do you know who I am? Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with? Just who the hell do you think you are?”
“Sir, please step out of the car.”
“No, wait, this is all a simple misunderstanding. Let me just…”
“Sir, I need you to step out of the car right now!”
Dan sat silently in the passenger seat of his wife’s car, looking out the window and not saying anything. He looked like a man who has spent the last 48 hours in the bowels of Philadelphia’s justice system; unshaven, messed-up hair, black eye and dried blood on the front of his Pierre Cardin shirt. His “suspended license,” which the courthouse was supposed to have corrected, had of course come up on the police computers, so he was now out on bail, pending a trial for driving under the influence, driving with a suspended license and resisting arrest. Without a license, his wife had had to come to the jail to pick him up, and she drove now in utter silence, lips drawn tight into a narrow slash of fury. The drive home was taking forever. Dan wished to God that she would say something, anything, or at least turn the goddamn radio on.
Dan sat uncomfortably at his boss Bob’s desk, waiting for him to finish shuffling through a small pile of papers. Every now and then Bob would look up, and Dan could see his gaze involuntarily flicking over to the black eye. All morning, Dan’s colleagues had been nodding curt hellos or turning away when they saw him coming, which, of course, meant that the rumor-mill had been working overtime, and that the news was all over the office by now. Bob, evidently deciding that he couldn’t stall any longer, tapped the papers on the desk to square them and then set them aside.
“I heard about your little, ah, incident there,” said Bob, pointing with a pencil at Dan’s eye. He waited for a moment, but Dan didn’t say anything. “We’re a tight-knit little community in this business, Dan. Word gets around pretty fast, you know.”
Dan exhaled deeply. “Look Bob, I know what you’re thinking and…”
“Daaaaan, Danny-Boy, why didn’t you come to us? You should have told us if you were having a problem. We could have helped you, there are programs…”
“I’m not ‘having a problem’, Bob. I made a little mistake, that’s all. I’m taking care of it, and I assure you it will never happen again.”
“That’s not the point, Dan,” Bob replied. “Everybody knows now! Your co-workers, your clients, everybody! Reputation is everything in this business, you know that.”
“So what are you saying, Bob?” Bob looked down at his desk. His silence said it all. “Jesus, Bob! How long have you and I known each other? Ten years? Fifteen? How much money have I made for this company?”
“I’m sorry, Danny-Boy, I really am… But I don’t make the rules of the game, I just have to play by ’em. You know how much I respect you, but this isn’t personal- it’s business.”
Dan ransacked the house looking for the $4,000 custom-made golf clubs his wife had given him for his 35th birthday. Right now, he didn’t want to think about his arrest, his termination or his impending trial. All he wanted was to play a few holes to soothe his jangled nerves, just keep his eye on the little white ball and not think about anything else. He distinctly remembered having put them away in the bedroom closet, but now they seemed to have disappeared. He rummaged through the closet and under the bed, a vague unease in the back of his mind making his motions increasingly jagged and frantic. Suddenly he froze, like a cartoon character doing a double take after running off the edge of a cliff. He slowly turned his gaze back toward the bed. There was a sheet of paper lying neatly in the center of it. It was like finding a shark in your swimming pool or a dildo in your oatmeal; an ordinary enough object made extraordinary by being somewhere it had no business to be. Hand trembling faintly, he picked it up. Written on it in blue ballpoint pen were the following words:
Dear Dan,
By the time you read this, I will be gone. Our marriage hasn’t been working for a long time now, and this drinking problem of yours is the final straw. I can’t help feeling that there just has to be more to life than this, so I have decided to go to Bora Bora with my dear friend Philippe, the French sculptor, to find myself. I’m not sure what I want anymore, but it’s pretty clear that this isn’t it. Someday, when all this is over, maybe we can be friends again. But until then, I’m afraid this is goodbye.
-Annette
Of course. That explained the missing clubs. The feeling slowly drained out of Dan’s left leg as he started sliding into some preternatural kind of shock. He lurched against the wall and began sliding down toward the floor. Then his left arm went numb. Then the left side of his face.
Death. He was sure of it. He would die of some unexplained neurological malfunction, a fatal lockup of the medulla, resulting in complete loss of respiratory control. They would find his body here in the bedroom, blue and stiff, clutching this damned letter in his right hand while halfway across the globe some evil bastard of a Frenchman was fucking his wife and swinging his nine wood.
Dan stood on the ledge outside a top-floor window in the university’s main downtown building and looked down at the tiny ant-world below. He pressed his back against the cold stone and his fingers sought out chinks in the rock to stabilize himself against the whipping of the wind, a useless instinct, considering what he had come here to do. Looking down again, the ground seemed suddenly to drop out. All of the lines that made up the giant glass-and-steel skyscrapers around him now disappeared into a single vanishing point far below. He imagined himself swan diving off the ledge, accelerating at 32 feet per second squared, quickly reaching terminal velocity. He saw himself rocketing past the window of a boardroom full of professors, the shock and horror on their faces as they looked at each other, then back at the window, not quite sure that they really saw what they think they saw. Then the explosive impact as his body violently smashes through the hood of a car belonging to some pin-striped stockbroker type who is on his way to work. In his mind’s eye, Dan could see his own skull caving in the windshield; safety glass, brains, viscera and shards of bone spraying everywhere, blood and bits of meat dripping down the fronts of store windows and stop signs. A sudden sense of vertigo seized him now, accompanied by elevator sensations in the pit of his stomach. He averted his gaze from the lethal asphalt below and instead concentrated on the ledge, the texture of its weather-beaten stones spattered with pigeon shit, the intricacy of the scrollwork sculpted into the ledge, the fangs and bat wings of the gargoyle protruding from the corner.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said the gargoyle.
“What the hell do you know about being me?” Dan snarled, dimly aware that he must be going mad.
“Much more than you suspect.”
“Yeah? Well fuck you, it’s my life.”
“Soooo, he thinks his life belongs to him, yes?” said the gargoyle significantly, turning to address another gargoyle that had shambled over to hear the conversation. “If he destroys himself, can he create another man to replace the one which he has destroyed? Ha! He thinks that the vandal who smashes a vase is more exalted than the potter who created it!” Dan felt a palpable jolt of power as the gargoyle turned its gaze toward him. It glowed with an inner light that radiated out through its eyes. It was like being caught in a police searchlight. “You seek answers, yes?”
“What are you, my guardian angel? My spirit guide?”
“Spirit guide!” the gargoyle exclaimed. “I haven’t heard that one in a long time… Some people have called me those things. There is an unseen world that coexists with this one, yes? It lies just below the surface of your perception. If you could see it, you would see that even now the air before you swarms with beings you can’t even imagine.” (This was not an agreeable thought.) “When necessary, I take on whatever form is most convenient.” A pause. “You are searching for something, yes? And you want it so badly that you will follow it right over that ledge. What do you seek, Daniel? What is it you want?”
Suddenly, the pressure that had been building up for years finally exploded and he cried out: “I want to be an idiot dancing in the sagebrush! I want to be like a small child! I want to be as innocent as the lamb!” A pause. Then, very quietly: “I want to be without sin.”
“Very well, then,” replied the angel, “make it so.” Puzzlement. No reply. “Years ago, when a circus would buy a baby elephant to train, the elephant was held captive by means of a manacle that was chained to a stake in the ground. Once the elephant accepted the idea of the stake, for the rest of its life, the tiniest toothpick was sufficient to keep it captive. Why? Because, even when the elephant was full-grown, it did not believe that it was strong enough to pull the stake out. It was held captive, not by the stake, but rather by the idea of the stake.” A pause to let this sink in. “God forgives you, Daniel. Get down off this ledge and go in peace.”
Enlightenment is a strange term. The divine spirit certainly has an aspect of light about it, but really, immolation or even incineration would be far more accurate. Enlightenment is like a blast furnace, a giant cutting torch that burns away the dross until only pure billet remains. To the ego and other false selves, enlightenment feels like death, which for them, it is. But after the purification has run its course, the true self remains, a hollowed-out shell filled with the song of the universe.
Buzzard had a bit of a problem. For the past week, Gino’s Bar & Grill had been frequented- every night on the dot of 8- by a sweet little thing who was finally, absolutely and completely the most beautiful girl Buzzard had ever seen. In fact, it might have been more than a week. Buzzard had no way of knowing how long it had taken him to notice her. (Although, he thought, the man who failed to notice this lovely creature probably needed his head- or other parts of his anatomy- examined.) Now, this is not the sort of thing that most people generally consider a problem. The problem was that Buzzard- the very same Buzzard who fearlessly faced down cops and outlaws alike and never backed down- was extremely shy when it came to women. She sat at the bar, dejectedly twirling a glass of white wine by the stem, long blond hair cascading over her face, lost in her troubles and oblivious to the world. Buzzard was a sucker for pretty and sad. There was just no getting around it. He strapped on his imaginary pair of big brass balls, took a mighty swig of beer for courage and walked over to the bar.
“Uh, hello,” Buzzard said in his most congenial tone. The girl turned her head slowly and found herself looking at a lanky but muscular torso. Then she looked up and seemed momentarily taken aback. But then again, this tall fellow with the long brown hair and neatly trimmed beard was pretty typical of what one would find in a place like Gino’s, wasn’t he?
“Hi,” she replied, a little abruptly.
Buzzard noticed that her glass was nearly empty. “Buy you a drink?” She nodded and Buzzard called out, “Hey Dave! Another Guinness for me and a wine for the lady.” Then, to the girl, “My name’s Horace, but everybody calls me Buzzard. What’s your name?”
The girl’s lip curled ever so slightly, no doubt at the incongruity of this wolf man who stood before her having a name like Horace. She sized him up with her piercing blue eyes, like a gambler weighing the odds before placing a bet. Then she said wryly, “Kira, but everybody calls me Kira.”
“I’ve never seen you here before.”
She looked down at the floor in the most dejected way that Buzzard had ever seen and replied, “I never had a reason to be here before.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Buzzard asked. Kira looked up from the floor. It had been a long time since anyone had taken any interest in her or her troubles.
Officer Willie van Dycke paced his apartment in a state of acute agitation. It wasn’t merely because he ran a risky but lucrative side business selling cocaine he’d taken from crime scenes, although that was certainly a part of it. It was because, for the past month, he’d been hiding his stash in his wife Kira’s car, and she had recently started coming home at later and later hours. Van Dycke did not relish the thought of being caught with a kilo of coke in his closet, and he was anxious to transfer it to the car as quickly as possible.
He paced around the apartment in a mean funk, eyes glazed, popping his knuckles, fidgeting with his cop mustache and flexing his big biceps. He nervously checked his watch. It was only 15 minutes since the last time he’d checked it. Finally he picked up the phone, brutally jabbing at it with his beefy index finger as if he meant to punch holes in it.
“Hello?”
“Hey Jimmy, it’s Willie.”
“Ay, Willie, what’s up?”
“Listen, Jimmy, can you do me a big favor?”
“Sure… Watcha need?”
“It’s about my wife.” He paused. It was damned embarrassing to have to admit this to someone. “She’s, uh, been coming home later and later every night and I wanna know what she’s up to. Do you think you could use one of the unmarked cars to tail her when she gets out of work tomorrow?”
There was a brief pause on the other end, which meant that van Dycke’s suspicions were obvious. Jimmy replied, “Sure thing, Willie. No problem,” in an overly cheerful way that indicated that he had no intention of probing at what he knew must be a very sore spot.
“Thanks a lot, pal. I owe you one, big time. And Jimmy? Just keep this between you and me, OK? I don’t want word gettin’ around.”
“You got it, pal.”
Van Dycke hung up the phone and poured himself a double scotch on the rocks. Apparently, slapping Kira around wasn’t good enough; she wasn’t getting the message. She better not be fucking somebody, he thought. If that dirty bitch is fucking somebody, I swear to God I’ll skin them both alive.
Jesus Moreno sat at the lunch counter of the ?50s retro-style Mill Creek Diner, known affectionately in the neighborhood as the Choke n’ Puke. The Choke n’ Puke had a black-and-white checkered floor, more chrome than a parking lot full of Harleys and walls covered with pictures of classic cars and Elvis memorabilia. The lights were too bright. The overpowered stereo system assaulted the customers with a steady stream of syrupy sweet doo-wop music. But Jesus hadn’t come for the ambience. He had chosen this spot specifically so that he could watch the apartment building across the street through the diner’s big plate glass window. Word on the street was that Officer van Dycke was getting a little too zealous about confiscating cocaine. He rarely made any arrests, but he always took the coke, so it didn’t take brain surgery to figure out that the officer probably had a little side business going. A stash like that would be worth a lot of money, maybe even enough for Jesus to bootstrap himself into The Big Time.
He had been positively elated the first time he’d seen van Dycke rummaging around in that green Ford Probe. He’d realized then that the stash was probably in the car. This was good. Moreno was a pretty good car thief, but he’d never tried his hand at burglary, and he wasn’t eager to cut his teeth on a cop’s apartment.
Jesus looked at his watch. Recently the Probe had begun arriving at the apartment later and later each night. He finished the last gritty dregs of his coffee and slipped a couple of bucks under the empty cup. He decided to follow the Probe tomorrow and see where it went. It would probably be safer to take it there, wherever “there” was, than to do it right in front of the apartment, where van Dycke could come out at any moment, guns blazing.
Special Agent Cox awoke with a start when he heard the big reel-to-reel tape recorder start up. Shit, he thought, musta dozed off again. There was nothing on the face of God’s green earth more boring than stakeout duty. He heaved his lean body upright, ran his fingers through his thinning hair and rubbed the stubble on his narrow jaw. As his eyes swam into focus, he saw the squat, bulldozer form of Special Agent Wacker, coffee in hand, peering through the telescope. Agent Cox turned up the volume of the tape recorder to an audible level. Tinny-sounding telephone audio squawked out of the speakers.
“Sure, Willie. Watcha need?”
“It’s about my wife.” (Embarrassed pause) “She’s, uh, been coming home later and later every night and I wanna know what she’s up to. Do you think you could use one of the unmarked cars to tail her when she gets out of work tomorrow?”
Cox turned down the sound again. “Shit,” he said. “I think the bastard’s using his wife’s car as a stash.”
“Yup,” replied Wacker without turning around.
“What should we do? Try to catch him making a sale?”
“Not unless he does it within the next couple days,” replied Wacker. “Waiting around with our thumbs up our asses is too risky. We don’t wanna blow this. Let’s give him a couple more days and if nothing happens, we’ll just take him the next time he goes for the stash.”
Cox frowned. “It’s his wife’s car. It’ll be damn hard to prove the stuff’s his.”
“Then we’ll take the wife,” Wacker replied, “and force him to fess up.”
“What if he lets her take the fall?”
Wacker turned around and shrugged nonchalantly. “If he lets her go down, it’s not our fault. There’s nothing we can do about it; we’ll just have to take her down.”
Kira and Buzzard were at Gino’s again the following night at the usual time. Kira, who had spent years building a wall of solitude around herself, now found someone knocking on that wall for the first time, trying to gain admittance. He was a mysterious stranger who was a porcupine on the outside but a marshmallow on the inside, and Kira found herself pecking at the wall like a chick trying to break through its shell. Kira and Buzzard were thus locked in conversation when he heard the sound.
Buzzard’s ears were finely tuned instruments that could detect, sort and catalog literally hundreds of different exhaust notes, and this was one he hadn’t heard in a long time, an old BSA. Kira saw Buzzard’s quizzical expression, ear cocked toward the door, lips pursed in the faint precursor to a question. Then his face broke into a wide grin and he said, to nobody in particular, “I can’t believe it! It can’t be!”
Then the door creaked open and a tall figure glided silently in, head shaved, long beard, dressed in brown burlap, a strange-looking priest of some mysterious religion. Buzzard looked at the figure, then back at Kira and said, “It’s Brother Daniel!” in a voice that was all joy and boiling excitement. He sprang up to meet Daniel, gave him a bear hug and clapped him hard on the shoulder. “Brother Daniel!” he shouted. “Gawd-damn it’s been a long time! Come here, sit down, you look dog-tired. Hey Dave,” he shouted at the bartender, “some red wine and another Guinness!” But in the back of Buzzard’s mind, a vague foreboding was forming, like the gathering clouds of a storm front. Brother Daniel had an odd habit of appearing at the exact moment when his presence was needed, and Buzzard couldn’t help but wonder what sort of mischief the Fates had in store.
Jesus grimaced and flexed his legs as far as space would allow. For the past two hours he’d been hiding behind the big green Dumpster at the far end of Gino’s parking lot. He had gotten his cousin to tail the Probe and drop him off here, at this seedy bar in a run-down section of town.
Jesus crept over to the building and peered in through the window. The cop’s wife looked preoccupied with a big wolf man and some reject from a bad kung fu movie. It seemed as good a time as any to get started.
He crept back to the car, unrolled a small tool-roll full of lock picking instruments and quickly went to work on the lock.
Officer Jimmy Rafferty sat in an unmarked car across the street from Gino’s. He was dressed in black, slouching low in the seat to avoid being seen, and peering into the window of the bar with a high-powered pair of binoculars. Some Puerto Rican guy was breaking into Kira’s car, but Jimmy wasn’t overly excited about that. He could afford to wait until the thief actually began taking the ignition lock apart, then he could get the guy for grand theft auto. Besides, Jimmy had more important things to worry about at the moment.
He put the binoculars down, whipped out a small cell phone and punched in a number. “Hello?” said a voice on the other end.
“Hey Willie, it’s Jimmy. I found Kira.”
“Great! Where is she?”
“She’s at this little dive called Gino’s. It’s on Gregg Street, near the warehouses.”
“Yeah, I know where it is. Made a couple of busts there once. What the hell is she doing there?”
“Looks like she’s with some big hairy guy…”
“Big hairy guy? What big hairy guy?”
“I dunno… Lanky guy, maybe 6-3, 6-4…long hair, beard; you can’t miss ‘im.”
“Thanks,” growled van Dycke as he slammed down the phone.
“Willie, wait!” shouted Jimmy, but he was shouting into a dead phone.
Agent Cox was rummaging through a brown paper bag full of stale snacks. Agent Wacker was peering through the telescope as usual.
“Our man’s on the move,” said Wacker. “Looks like he’s in a hurry, too.”
“Wanna follow him?” asked Cox.
“You bet,” replied Wacker. “Let’s roll.”
Kira was both intrigued and amused by the unusual cast of characters that had chosen to converge at, of all places, this seedy little biker bar. This latest character moved like a cat and spoke like a Zen monk. There was something about his presence that made her keenly aware of everything around her, as if her own psychic energies were being somehow buoyed by his immense and powerful aura. She reached down to get a cigarette from her purse, but her purse was not hanging from the chair. “Damn,” she said.
“What?” replied Buzzard.
“My cigarettes… I must have left my purse in the car.”
“I’ll get it for you. Which car is it?”
“Green Ford Probe,” she replied as she dug the keys out of her pocket and handed them to Buzzard.
“Be right back,” he said, drawing his long body upright.
Buzzard started to open the door but stopped short. Through the crack, he could see the Probe, as well as the little skinny guy who was working away at the lock. In one fluid motion, Buzzard reached his long arm around the bar to where he knew Big Dave kept the shotgun. Dave did a take, then a doubletake and shouted “Hey!” but by then Buzzard was already out the door.
“You better get the fuck away from that car!” Buzzard shouted as he strode toward the Probe. Jesus whirled around, a long, wicked-looking blade appearing suddenly in his hand, but then he heard the ch-chak as Buzzard cocked the shotgun and he knew he was fucked.
Jesus and Buzzard were both taken by surprise when they saw the cop cruiser screech into the parking lot, practically on two wheels. Jesus was still holding the knife, but in his panic, he seemed to have forgotten about it. A big, muscular cop with a square jaw and a cop mustache leapt out of the cruiser, revolver drawn. Buzzard put the shotgun down, pointed at Jesus and yelled, “He’s trying to steal that car!”
Incredibly, though, the cop was pointing his revolver at Buzzard, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Buzzard’s guts clenched into a knot as he suddenly realized that something was very, very wrong. “You hairy freak!” the cop screeched. “I’ll teach you to fuck around with my wife!” The tip of the revolver was jittering in the cop’s shaking grip.
“Wife?” Buzzard yelled. “What wife? Who the hell are you?”
A black sedan screeched to a halt behind the cop cruiser and two men in black suits and black ties jumped out. One was tall and lean, the other short and built like a bulldozer. Both had auto pistols drawn. They ran toward Buzzard and van Dycke, guns pointed at the latter. The squat one was shouting, “Put it down, van Dycke! The jig is up!”
“This sonofabitch is fucking my wife!”
“Fuck you! I’ve never seen your wife!”
And suddenly, there was another gun-wielding man adding to the bedlam, shouting, “Willie! Don’t do it! He’s unarmed! It’s not worth it!”
Nobody even saw Brother Daniel move. But suddenly he was standing there, holding a katana in a two-fisted kenjutsu stance, its blade spattered with dark red gore. Van Dycke looked down; where before there had been a hand and a gun, now there was nothing but a stump. He opened his mouth as if to scream, and a fountain of red began to gush from the end of his ruined arm. Van Dycke sank to his knees, his nervous system locked up with shock. For a long moment nobody moved. Then Jimmy started yelling, “Ambulance! Somebody get an ambulance!”
The magic words “officer down” had brought the ambulance quickly. Jimmy had been able to prevent van Dycke from bleeding to death in the interim by using his belt as a tourniquet. Jesus Moreno and Brother Daniel had both been taken into custody at the scene. Daniel had simply shrugged, handed his sword to Agent Cox and stepped into the car without complaint or protest.
Brother Daniel was released two days later. Moreno had cut a deal for leniency in exchange for his agreement to testify against van Dycke, so Kira was off the hot seat. Officer van Dycke was at the county hospital in critical but stable condition, awaiting indictment on attempted murder and assorted drug trafficking charges.
Now Buzzard and Brother Daniel were back in Gino’s, Buzzard with his ever-present Guinness, Daniel with his red wine. “They took me down to the station for questioning,” said Brother Daniel, “but they had to let me go after they took the other witnesses’ statements. That cop was going to shoot you, everybody saw it. They even gave me my sword back.”
“What didja do,” asked Buzzard, grinning, “use The Force on ’em?”
Brother Daniel returned the grin. “Something like that,” he said.
“Where are you going now?” asked Buzzard.
“I don’t know,” replied Daniel with a shrug. “I guess I’ll just keep listening to the wind.”
The End
