heard someone’s panicked voice call out from the hallway.
“It’s not him!”
The door squealed when I opened it, its hinges protesting from lack of use. I quickly crossed the deck and went over the railing like a cowboy mounting a stolen horse. I went down the railing until I was hanging from the deck, twenty feet above the sharply sloping ground below. In the dim moonlight I looked for one of the iron support beams that held the deck and house to the side of the hill. I was intimately familiar with the design of the house from having supervised its reconstruction from the ground up after the ’ninety-four earthquake.
I had to move six feet along the edge of the deck before I could reach in and grab hold of one of the support beams. I wrapped my arms and legs around it and slid down to the ground. As I went down I heard their footsteps on the deck above me.
“He went down there! He went down there!”
“Where? I don’t see -”
“He went down there! You two go. We’ll take the street.”
I was on the ground beneath the shelter of the deck. I knew if I stepped out and tried to make my way down the steep slope to one of the streets or houses in the canyon below I would be exposed to my armed pursuers. Instead I turned and climbed up the hill under the house and further into the shelter of the structure. I knew there was a trench dug into the ground up there, where the sewer main had to be replaced after the quake. Above me there would also be the trapdoor that opened in the hallway. But I had designed it during the rebuilding of the house as an escape route, not a means of ingress. It was locked from inside and no use to me at the moment.
I moved up the hill, found the trench and rolled into it. I blindly moved my hands around at the bottom, looking for a weapon. All I found were cracked pieces of the old sewer main. I found one shard that was triangular and might work as a weapon. It would have to do.
Two men moved like shadows down the support beams to the ground below the deck. The moonlight reflected off the steel of their pistols. The reflections also showed me that one had on eyeglasses and I remembered him from the magazine story and photo. His name was Bernard Banks, known as B.B. King among the night crawlers. He had been at the bar at Chet’s when I had left.
The two shadows exchanged whispers and then split up, one moving down the hill and to the left, the other-Banks-maintaining his position. It was some kind of tactical strategy in which one would hopefully chase me into the waiting pistol of the other.
From my angle above him Banks was a hard target silhouetted by the lights from the canyon below. He was fifteen feet from me but I had nothing to use as a weapon except a shard of old iron pipe. Still, it was enough. I had survived more missions into the tunnels of Vietnam than I could remember. I’d once spent a whole night in the elephant grass with the enemy moving all around me. And I had lived and worked for twenty-five-plus years on the streets of this city with a badge. This kid was going to be no match for me. I knew none of them would be.
When Banks turned to look down the canyon slope, I rose up in the trench and threw the pipe shard into the brush out to his right. It made a sound like an animal moving through high grass. As he turned, tensed and raised his weapon I slid over the top of the trench and started moving down the slope toward him, all the while keeping one of the iron beams between us as a sound and visual blind.
I got to the beam and he still had not turned from the direction of the sounds in the brush. He was just putting the misdirection together and finally turning back when I got to him. My left fist hit him squarely between the eyes while my right closed over the gun and I put a finger through the trigger guard. I had actually been aiming for his mouth but the punch broke his glasses in half at the bridge and staggered him just the same.