Lucifer's Hammer

“Oh, dammit, you know what I mean.”

“Sure.” She put his coffee down on the desk and opened his calendar. “You have lunch with the Lieutenant Governor. Don’t forget.”

“That moron. If there was anything that would get me out of my euphoric mood, you’ve just said it. But I’ll be nice. You can’t believe how nice I’ll be.”

“Good.” She turned to leave.

“Hey,” he called, stopping her. “Look, let’s talk about it. When you get back from Los Angeles. I mean, it’s my kid too…”

“Sure.” Then she was gone.

“Hey, baby, that Hammer’s go

“Bull-fucking-shit,” Alim Nassor said, and he smiled. “We’re go

More power to them. One thing that comet was doing — it was sucking the honkies right out of their houses. Alim’s cruises through Brentwood and Bel Air turned up lots of houses with milk bottles and old newspapers on the porches. He went through in an old pickup truck, lawn mowers and garden tools piled in back. Who’d look twice at black gardeners? So when they stopped to collect the papers and milk cartons nobody noticed. And now he had the addresses, and they’d cleaned up so nobody else would come try a ripoff…

They’d go through Bel Air and Brentwood like a mowing machine. Alim Nassor had set it up with half a dozen burglary outfits, with men who weren’t so good at taking orders, but knew a good thing when they saw it. A Hammer of God didn’t come twice in a man’s lifetime.

Some of these places had to be setups. Pigs on stakeout. There were ways to take care of that little problem, too. It only took pla

Still… there were so many honkies moving out. Rich honkies, people who knew things. Down at City Hall everybody was nervous, too. Maybe that thing could really hit?

Alim had gone through the newspapers and magazines. He could read pretty well. A little slow, but he could puzzle it out, and some of the drawings made it all clear. You didn’t want to be on low ground. Waves a thousand feet high! The cat who drew them had some imagination. He showed the L.A. City Hall part underwater, the tower rising out of the flood, and the County Administration and the Courthouse with their roofs just sticking up. All them pigs dead, wouldn’t that be something? But he sure didn’t want to be here when that happened.

Maybe it wouldn’t, and all the honkies would come home. “Won’t they be surprised,” Alim murmured.

“Huh?”

“The honkies. Won’t they be surprised when they get home?”

“Yeah. Why just these places? If we hit just the richest houses in a lot bigger territory, we—”

“Shut up.”

“Sure.”

“I want us close to each other. If one of these places turns out to be full of pigs, we can call for help on the CB.”

“Okay, sure.”

Hammer of God. What if it was real? Where could they go? Not south, that was for sure. Politicians could talk about black-brown unity, but that was jive. Chicanos didn’t like blacks, blacks hated chicanos. There were clubs where you had to kill a black to join down there in chicano turf, and they were tough mothers, and the further south you went the more there were.

“We take guns tonight,” he said. “We take all the guns.”

Harold flinched, and the truck swerved a little. “You think we’ll get trouble?”

“I just want to be ready,” Alim said. And if that fucking comet… Better to have guns and bullets, tonight and tomorrow. And take some food. He’d stash it himself, so as not to upset the brothers.

At least they’d be high up, if it came.

Patrolman Eric Larsen had come to Los Angeles from Topeka with a university degree in English and an urgent impulse to write for television and the movies. The need to support himself and a chance opportunity led him to the Burbank Police Department. He told himself it would be valuable experience. Look what Joseph Wambaugh had managed from a police career! And Eric could write; at least, he had a degree that said he could.

Three years later he still hadn’t sold a script, but he had confidence, strange tales to tell and a considerably better understanding of both human nature and the entertainment industry. He’d also done a lot of growing up. He’d lived with a woman, been engaged twice and got over his inability to have casual friendships with girls, even though he hadn’t lost a strong tendency to idealize women. It hurt Eric to see young runaways exploited by the street people. He kept thinking of what they might have become.

He’d also learned the police view of the world: All humanity is divided into three parts — cops, scumbags and civilians. He hadn’t yet adopted an attitude of contempt toward civilians. They were the people he was supposed to protect, and perhaps because he was not a career policeman (although Burbank didn’t know that) he could take his job seriously. The civilians paid him. One day he would be one of them.

He’d learned to curse the judicial system, while keeping enough literary objectivity to admit that he didn’t know what to replace it with. There were people who could be “rehabilitated.” Not many. Most scumbags were just that, and the best thing to do with them would be to take them out to San Nicholas Island and put them ashore. Let them victimize each other. The trouble was, you couldn’t always tell which ones should be put away forever and which could fit back into the real world. He often got into arguments with his partners over that. His buddies on the force called him “Professor” and kidded his literary ambitions, and the diary he kept; but Eric got along with nearly everyone, and his sergeant had recommended him for promotion to Investigator.

The comet fascinated Eric, and he’d read all he could about it. Now it dominated the skies above. Tomorrow it would be past. Eric drove with his partner through strangely active Burbank streets. People were moving about, piling goods into trailers, doing things inside their houses. There was a lot of traffic.

“Be glad when that thing’s past,” his partner said. Investigator Harris was all cop. The brilliant light show in the skies above was only another problem to him. If it was a pretty show, he’d look at films of it after it was past. Right now it was a pain in the arse.

“Car forty-six. See the woman at eight-nine-seven-six Alamont. Reports screaming in the apartment above her. Handle Code Three.”

“Ten-four,” Eric told the microphone. Harris had already sent the cruiser around a tight curve.

“That’s not a family-fight house,” Harris said. “Singles apartments. Probably some guy can’t take no for an answer.”

The cruiser pulled up in front of the apartment building. It was a large, fancy place, swimming pool and sauna. Rubber trees grew on both sides of the entrance. The girl standing behind the glass lobby doors wore a thin robe over a blue silk nightgown. She seemed scared. “It’s in three-fourteen,” she said. “It was horrible! She was screaming for help…”

Investigator Harris stopped just long enough to look on the mailbox for 314. “Colleen Darcy.” He led the way up the stairs, his nightstick drawn.

The even-numbered apartments on the third floor faced onto an interior hallway. Eric thought he remembered seeing the building from the other side. It had little private balconies, screened from the street. Probably good places for girls to sunbathe. The hall was freshly painted, and the impression was of a nice building, a good place to live for young singles. Of course the best apartments would be on the other side, overlooking the pool.