125004846X (N) by Charles Falco

Author:Charles Falco
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

16

Endgame

In the last three months of the investigation, I occupied Rust’s one-bedroom house behind his home in Lucerne Valley, an isolated plot of land situated on a hill surrounded by desert tumbleweed. By now I had left Joanna and needed a temporary place to crash. Rust, a member of Death Valley, welcomed the company, though most evenings he alternated between firing random buckshot from his back porch into purple sage and twirling his pistol in the air while he watched his favorite television show, The Sopranos. We sat in the dark, drank cheap beer from sweaty cans, and watched James Gandolfini’s face flicker against blue tint. His character preached about respect and rats, and Rust leaned forward, elbows on his knees, face flushed from alcohol, and said, “If I ever found out we had a snitch, he’d be gone.” Rust cocked his pistol for emphasis, pointed the barrel at the wall, and dry fired.

Note taken. Rust had an arsenal of weapons that included an AR-15, an SKS, a Sig Sauer, a .40 caliber pistol, a shotgun, and two Golden Bear bolt action rifles. He stashed a long rifle he camouflaged with duct tape in an attic crawl space because he feared it might be stolen.

One morning I noticed it missing.

“I took it to have a scope fitted,” Rust explained and offered to give me his .12 gauge shotgun. He had duped a relative who worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department into checking the serial number on the weapon and confirmed it was “hot.”

“I don’t want it in my house,” Rust said.

Meanwhile, Koz worried that I had become too soft, “too nice, too much of a gentleman” gangster. He didn’t want me to be like “fucking James Bond,” but he urged me to “stand up to the Vagos, be more aggressive.” So far, I had never initiated fights. I had reacted to beatings. I had defended Psycho as any good minion would. But for all of my caution, I had telegraphed my difference. I needed to blend, deflect the “cop talk,” be a “badass.”

I could do that. At the next Church meeting, in Lizard’s garage, Psycho complained that I was “spending too much time with Death Valley members.” Maybe I needed a loyalty check. Head Butt agreed, said I was being “disrespectful.” He smacked his fist into a cracked leather motorcycle seat. “We should pull your colors.”

I glared at him. “Pull my colors?” I was living in Rust’s house. “I’ll pull them off right now, put them on the ground. If you can take them, you can have them. But I’ll kill you first. I’ll kill you, motherfucker.”

Head Butt irritated me so much I almost convinced myself that I would kill him. Rhino put a warning hand on my shoulder as Head Butt snorted and shook like an injured bull. His breathing was labored. He balled his hands into fists. Spoon, the chapter’s designated sergeant at arms, suddenly lunged at me and tackled me to the dirt. I pinned him down and shoved my knee into his face.

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