Army of Devils

"Did I give you the order?"

"No..."

"Then why did you..."

"Shabaka told..."

"He didn't tell you anything. How many rifles did you give the gangs?"

"Only one. The brother who Shabaka sent over — I gave him..."

"Don't lie to me!"

"Only one. I thought..."

"You thought wrong."

Silva signaled to his "street workers."

The three hoods jerked him from the leather couch and marched him across the condo, one hood gripping each arm, one behind him. Ruiz felt steel press into his back.

A hood told him, "You're going with us. Make any noise and we kill you, you know? You go

"No. Not me. I'm cool."

The hoods laughed. Ruiz saw Silva smile at the remark and the laughter.

Fernando Ruiz knew they would kill him.

They don't want to do it here, he realized. They'll take me someplace. Someplace where they can kill me and dump me. But they're trying to make me think they won't. Dig it, you got to make them think you believe them!

"Shabaka sent them. Why don't you ask him?"

"We'll talk about that with him," Silva told him. "Now you're cooperating. You don't cooperate, we shoot you down, understand me?"

"Anything you want to know…"

Silva swung open the door. In the last minutes of the smoggy Hollywood afternoon, the sky gray, the air gray, the pool and landscaping of the complex grayed by the smoggy air, the five men left the condo. The three ex-con "streetworkers" stayed close, hands gripping his arms to restrain Ruiz. They went down the stairs to the underground garage.

The hoods released their grip on Ruiz as they descended. Silva and a hood walked ahead of him. The other two stomped down the stairs behind him. At the bottom of the stairwell, the first hood shoved open the fire door to the garage and held it open for the group.

Five steps in front of him, Ruiz saw a convertible waiting. The blond young man behind the wheel revved the engine impatiently as he waited to exit the underground structure. He eased forward, the Fiat's front bumper almost touching the steel security gate as it rolled aside.

Ruiz shoved past Silva and dived. As the hoods shouted, Ruiz opened the door and landed by the driver in the front seat. His legs screaming with pain where they hit the top of the convertible's door, his head jammed between the bucket seats, he reached down and pushed the gas pedal with his hand.

In the confusion and shouting, the driver popped the clutch. Tires squealing, the Fiat lurched up the ramp to the street.

"They want to kill me! Get me out of here. Get away from..."

The driver whipped through a screeching right turn. He slowed as he grabbed Ruiz.

"Get out of my car, you crazy!" the driver shouted into the cocaine freak's face.

When a bullet shattered the windshield, the driver screamed and swerved and floored the accelerator.

Fernando Ruiz had less than a minute of freedom. Then a black-and-white squad car stopped the careering sports car.

8

In a tobacco-stinking lounge of Los Angeles International Airport, Carl Lyons and Flor Trujillo watched a jet taxi to a passenger-loading bridge. To bring it the last hundred feet to the bridge, field technicians had coupled a tug's tow-bar to the jet's front landing-gear strut. The tug docked the jet.

For a moment, Lyons took his attention from the runway. His eyes focused on the plate glass in front of them, on the mirrored image of himself and Flor standing together, his arm over her shoulders, like lovers waiting for arriving friends.

Flor had been quiet in the hours since the horror of the morgue. Though her professional demeanor tended toward silence broken by incisive observations — in contrast to Lyons's thoughtless comments and brutal joking — neither of them approached their time together as "on-duty time." In contrast to Flor the professional, Flor the lover joked and teased and gossiped. Carl Lyons had always considered the time he enjoyed with Flor to be precious.

The past times together — in the Caribbean or Washington, D.C., or New York — in the few hours or days their schedules allowed them to be together, he escaped from the discipline of the hard-core fighter. Flor knew his work. She also understood his reflexes.

Once, at breakfast in New York, with early morning traffic racing past a small cafe, an incoming customer opened the front door exactly as a truck backfired three times, one-two-three, like the firing of a large-caliber autopistol or a battle rifle with a low cyclic rate.

Lyons, seated at a small chrome-and-vinyl cafe table, had jumped simultaneously up and to the side. However, the table, bolted to the floor, had stopped him. The impact of his legs and torso against the table had overturned the water and juice glasses. Their breakfast plates clattered across the vinyl tabletop. All the waitresses and other diners stared at the big ta

But Flor, knowing why Lyons had jumped, laughed. After a second, even as his heart raced with adrenaline, Lyons laughed, too.

Flor understood his silences and sudden rages. She understood his strange jokes. She understood his extreme generosity.

Now Lyons studied the lovely young woman beside his image in the plate glass. In her high heels, she stood only half a head short of his own height. She wore a modest summer dress with an abstract motif. Yet on her, the modest dress revealed and celebrated her body; a belt at her waist accentuated her slender form, her full breasts; the pale blue fabric contrasted engagingly with her dark skin and ink-black hair.

He touched the smooth fabric of the dress while his eyes watched his hand stroke her shoulder. In the reflection, she turned to him. He watched her profile as she looked to his face. He studied her while she studied him.

Overcome with a sudden desire to hold her, to touch her, to taste her, he pulled her against him.

One arm around her shoulders, the other hand on the muscled arch of the small of her back, he held her, feeling her breath on his neck, the rise and fall of her breasts against his shirt as she breathed. He kissed her, lightly, only wanting the sensation of her lips against his, to smell the warmth and moisture of her breath.

Brushing his face over her hair — she wore no perfume, used a shampoo without scent — then putting his face against the side of her neck, he smelled her sweat. The sweet yet acrid scent of her summer-sweating flesh struck memories, which came like flames, memories of the previous night, of her sweat glistening on her body…

His hands clawed her against him in the passenger lounge.

Flor laughed as she eased away. "We're in public, you animal."

He pulled her against him again and whispered,

"We'll go to another motel. Maybe a hotel. The Bonaventure. Soon as we drop them off."

"Think it makes a difference, a motel or a hotel?"

"Not to me. Someplace where we can laugh."

Lyons glanced past the waiting crowd.

No passengers came from the jet bridge. Then a technician opened the doors to the lounge. The first passengers came a second later.

Hand in hand, Lyons and Flor went to meet his partners. They passed returning vacationers, businessmen, elderly travelers, women with babies in their arms. Friends and families welcoming the passengers talked and laughed all around them. But many of the travelers had returned to Los Angeles reluctantly. Lyons heard snatches of conversation.

"Think we'll be safe on the way home?"

"Did you bring a gun for me?"

"The east-coast news people — they say it's a war zone."