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I push back with one hand and buck the cop off. Then I have the other three on top of me and I can’t move. Someone else gets their cuffs out. I feel one close on my wrist. Even though I know I’m going to lose, I’m not going to make killing me easy. I kick back and launch one of them off me and get a swift knee to the back of my head. It forces me all the way down under the filthy street water. I have to hold my breath to keep from drowning. I can’t even fight anymore.
At first, the sound of screams is muffled by the water. It churns around me as one by one the cops disappear off my back. I sit up and gulp in a lungful of air.
Hellhounds are outlined in the squad-car headlights. One gnaws on a downed cop’s leg and the others are off chasing the rest. I hear gunshots, but can’t see out into the dark. I don’t have to because I know what’s happening. The cops are losing. Hellhounds are bad one-on-one. When they’re in a pack, there isn’t much that can stop them. Sure as hell not a few cop sidearms.
I crawl over to the downed cop and feel around his belt. Find his keys and unlock the handcuff snapped around my wrist. I get up and look around the scene for my gun and ID. I find both by one of the squad cars. The gun is all right, but the ID is a little waterlogged. I slip it into my pocket and put the Colt in the waistband behind my back. Candy has been on me to get a holster. She says my not using one is part of my just-passing-through mentality and that I should get over it. Maybe she’s right. Not necessarily about the holster, but about the passing-through thing. Here I am half drowned and with bullets in my chest trying to fucking save this piece-of-shit world. Again. Maybe that doesn’t qualify as just passing through anymore. Hell. Maybe I really am sticking around. But I’m still not folding towels.
By the time I’m on my feet, the rest of the hounds have run off after the cops or gone back to chasing down the chop shops. I find my goggles and get back on the bike. Slowly. Every move aches. The body armor might have kept the beatdown from cracking more of my insides, but my ribs took a pounding and the bullets danced a jig all over my insides. I sit still for a minute pulling myself together.
I try to kick-start the bike, but my body has had about as much as it can take tonight. On the third try, I get lucky. The engine rumbles to life and I take off. My half-hour lead time is probably up by now, but the hounds have cleared out of Hollywood Forever by now. I’ll let them clean up the last of the chop shops for a while before herding them back Downtown.
I take off on the bike, but as I swing onto Hollywood Boulevard another cop car makes the turn with me, its blinking light bar turning the empty street into the world’s saddest rave. But I’m not about to let any more vigilantes get their hands on me and there’s no way I’m leading them to Max Overdrive.
I gun the bike, blowing by Musso & Frank’s and the Egyptian Theatre. Wouldn’t you know it, right at the corner of Hollywood and North Highland there’s a familiar naked guy in the street. I try to go around Shaky. As I swing past he looks like a granite monolith, a tangle of thorns, a pulsing black hole. Just as I’m about to pass him, the bike sputters, coughs, and stops. The asshole did it. The asshole killed my bike. I put down the kickstand and head for him.
“Just who the fuck do you think you are?”
“The wronged returned for retribution,” he says.
The squad car fishtails to a stop fifty feet from us. The cops get out and hunker down behind the doors. They don’t bother with pistols. One has a shotgun and the other an HK rifle.
“Put your hands on your head,” shouts the woman cop.
Shaky looks at me. I shrug.
“I’m not doing it. But you can do what you want.”
He looks at the cops and says, “Die, God’s favorites.”
The cops evaporate, like ice dropped into boiling water.
“I could have used that trick five minutes ago.”
Shaky turns back to me.
“Give me the Qomrama. I won’t ask again.”
“No.”
“Do you doubt who I am?”
“I know who you are, but it’s in my best interest not to give a damn.”
Shaky walks to the corner, by the old Hollywood First National Bank Building. Like a lot of L.A. buildings, it can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up. A weird mix of Gothic, Art Deco, with a little Spanish thrown in, it’s the perfect place for Shaky to duck into—an empty eleven-story hulk, way past its sell-by date. Just like him.
Only he doesn’t duck inside. Shaky strolls into a wall, softens, spreads out like mist, and merges with the concrete.
I hear his voice in my head.
“Perhaps my godly power will not hurt you as long as you possess the Qomrama, but that does not mean you cannot be hurt.”
The building shakes like we’re having another quake, but the street stays perfectly still. It’s just the bank that’s moving.
The sidewalk around it cracks and splits open. Water pipes burst. Parked cars roll over on their sides. Buildings all up and down the block shatter and collapse.
Slowly, the bank rises up off its foundations. It twists, like an animal shaking a pest off its fur. Then it stands. Yes, the building can stand because it has a kind of human shape now. A grimy concrete, steel, and plate-glass body. I-beam and ductwork limbs. On top is a billboard for a new reality-TV series featuring five freakishly attractive teens. Their ten vacant eyes blink in unison as Shaky surveys his domain.
His voice whispers in my head.
