Hi Five Page 17

  Hugo got much respect from the gang. He’d served a tour in Afghanistan and if you were ex-military you were special. You had skills. You’d been trained by the US Army, the most powerful fighting force in the world. At demonstrations, he was a brawler, another point of pride. Nothing he liked better than thumping some nigger with a sign that said WHITE POWER IS UNAMERICAN or some other stupid shit. Hugo had gone to a white power demonstration in Berkeley. Some Jew girl started screaming at him about being racist scum and he hit her in the face. It was still on YouTube. Everybody had seen it fifty times and laughed like hell fifty times. The first time his son saw it, he laughed but it sounded forced. Hugo let it pass.

  He and Sidero were on Angus’s payroll. Angus gave the others a cut to split and a discount on guns. It was a bonus. Especially for the guys who joined the gang for reasons that had nothing to do with white nationalism. They were lonely or lost or oddballs or pissed off at life in general or they wanted to belong. If racism was what it took to have drinking buddies and a place to hang, then they were racists all the way.

  Hugo was the real thing. He’d been taught by the real thing. His father, Hugo Senior, had a Confederate flag hung over what he’d called “the marriage bed.” There were pamphlets all over the house. “The South will Rise Again.” “Securing the Future for Our White Children.” “Why We’re Becoming a Mongrel Race.” Logos were tacked on the front door, Senior patiently explaining them. Kekistan is a fictional country and its flag mimics the Nazi war flag. The Kekistan logo replaces the swastika and the green background replaces the red. The Deus Vult was like a cross made with two capital Is. It meant “God’s Will,” supposedly said by Pope Urban in 1095 when he made a speech urging the First Crusaders to free the Holy Land from the Muslim infidels. There were wrought-iron numbers on the front door, 1488, even though that wasn’t their address. Fourteen referred to the fourteen-word neo-Nazi slogan: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children. And H was the eighth letter of the alphabet—88 was another way of saying Heil Hitler. There was other stuff Hugo thought was stupid but he never said it out loud. The Red Wings logo was altered and repurposed by a group of white nationalists who called themselves the Detroit Right Wings.

  Every morning, Junior and Senior would give each other a heel-clicking, spine-straightening Nazi salute. Senior said the Jews ran the educational system and that’s why Hugo was homeschooled. His mother took care of the three Rs. Senior taught him the ways of the world. They both enjoyed it. They’d sit on the couch together, Senior’s arm around him, calling him sport and buddy and pal while he talked about the coming race war or the extinction of the white race. He made Hugo memorize a passage from Revelation 14. “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels.”

  Jews, Senior explained, not only worshipped the Beast, they had killed Our Lord Jesus too. Those were among Hugo’s best memories, safe and cozy on the couch with his father who loved him so very much. They’d thumb through issues of Guns & Ammo or Tactical Life. They watched action movies, sci-fi and more relevant stuff too. Romper Stomper, Into the Homeland, Skinheads, American History X, The Infiltrator. Senior and Junior always rooted for the bad guys. They also watched documentaries about the rise of the Third Reich, Hitler and the Nazis and the so-called Holocaust, Senior pointing out all the things the Jew writers got wrong and all the things that were faked.

  But if Hugo didn’t pay attention or got sleepy or wanted to watch TV, Senior would get pissed and start screaming and then he’d take his belt off and swing away with that big silver belt buckle, always careful to keep the bruises and welts where the teachers wouldn’t see them. Drinking made it worse. It wasn’t so much the pain that hurt Hugo, it was Senior’s disappointment, his love vanishing like a gunshot, loud and fiery, resounding in your ears, the gun smoke hazing your eyes, and then a breeze, hardly one at all—and it was gone.

  There was a lull in the argument. Hugo couldn’t hear Jenn’s voice anymore. Maybe they’d called a truce or they were fucking or maybe Jenn went to the bathroom—probably the likeliest explanation. Only a bodily function would shut that bitch up. Didn’t matter. Maybe it was the weed, but Hugo was in a good mood. He was optimistic about the future. That was the one thing you could thank Obama for. He was a rallying cry for white nationalists all across the country. Hugo was a registered user on Stormfront, a white nationalist website. When Obama became president there were thirty thousand new users, and that was one website. One. You project that out to the rest of the country and there were millions of other white nationalists out there; Charlottesville was a call to action. It was time to get serious, quit hiding in the fucking toolies. They were mainstream now. I mean if the goddamn president of the United States is on your side and calls you a very fine person and if governors and state legislators and high-ranking officials were keeping the niggers and Mexicans out of the voting booth, well, hell, what the fuck were you waiting for?

  The argument had shifted to the kitchen. Hugo could see Sidero, leaning back against the counter, talking on the phone, Jenn across from him, standing there with her arms folded across her big tits and scowling, her favorite expression.

  “Yeah, I know the plan, okay?” Sidero said, exasperated. “Yeah, I already talked to Angus—”

  “Tell Dwight to go fuck himself, Sid,” Jenn said in a loud whisper.

  Sidero sighed into the phone. “Didn’t I just say I know the plan?” he said.

  Jenn stuck her head out at him, her eyes widening. “Tell him to fuck off, Sid!”

  Sidero put his hand over his ear. “Angus said what?”

  Jenn shouted at him, “Tell him to tell Angus you’ve got this covered and they should shut the fuck up and mind their business!” Sidero hung up.

  “You’re such a fucking wimp,” Jenn said.

  “Yeah, you told me that a hundred times already.”

  “Why do you take it?” she said, getting earnest. “Come on, tell me once and for all why you put up with this shit?”

  Hugo wondered about that himself. If Angus treated him that way he’d put that old fuck in a body bag.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Sidero said, walking into the hallway.

  “Why do you keep saying that? I’m not stupid, you know.”

  No, she’s not stupid, Hugo thought, but she was a badgering ball-buster. He wondered what Isaiah was doing. Angus had fucked him over good. The case, if you could call it that, was a bunch of bullshit. From what Hugo had heard so far, it was Mission: Impossible without the Mission.

  Isaiah had nothing on the killers and nothing on who employed them. He had no leads, no suspects, no direction and no possibilities. He was no closer to resolving the case than he was at the beginning. Christiana’s arrest hung over him. There would be no warning. One minute, Stella would be safe, and the next, she’d be in serious peril, all her struggle and hard work at risk for something she had no part in. He thought about her, rehearsing Vivaldi, happy in her focus, joy in her intensity, like Grace when she was painting. He thought about Angus’s men, grabbing her in a parking lot and smashing her fingers with a hammer against the hood of a car. He thought about her screaming.

  It was time to get desperate, he decided. To do something hopeless. To embrace futility. Ordinarily, he would do the job alone but he called Dodson. Maybe because the case was so intractable and his efforts were so pointless, but the truth was, Isaiah was lonely—no, that wasn’t it. More like stranded, alone on an uncharted island in the middle of the Pacific, building bonfires that no one would ever see. He wanted company. But there was a hidden agenda too: proving Dodson wrong. Isaiah didn’t need help and he didn’t need a partner. He was still IQ and a neighborhood icon. Dodson would be reminded of that when he watched Isaiah break the case without his help and come out o
f it unscathed.

  Tyler lived in an older, very exclusive neighborhood in San Joaquin Hills. The houses were large and venerable, the styles traditional. Some of them, Isaiah guessed, might have been built as far back as the thirties. They had shake roofs, wide porch beams and dormer windows. Their lawns were expansive and lush, flanked by flowerbeds and overhung with mature trees, the kinds of houses that stayed in a family for generations. An odd choice for an ex-marine. Maybe Tyler grew up in a similar house or found serenity here after the ravages of modern warfare. It made sense when you thought about it. Isaiah would’ve chosen a place like this over a modern house any day.

  The layout of the neighborhood made escape difficult. The narrow winding roads were exclusive to the neighborhood. Some ended in cul-de-sacs. The rest led to two public entrances. Easy to cut off for security patrols and law enforcement. Isaiah decided to park below Tyler’s house on a street outside the neighborhood, then approach with Dodson from the brushy hill at the back of the property. If they went in daylight, they were too easily seen. At night, they’d have to use flashlights. Isaiah chose evening, when they’d be less visible but there was still enough light to see.

  They wore their caps pulled down, latex gloves and dark clothes. They climbed the hill, dust rising in the breeze, the brush thick and thorny, Dodson muttering about fucking up his new Pumas the entire way. Isaiah couldn’t stop the loop in his head. This is stupid. This is really stupid. It was warm and they were sweating through their clothes by the time they reached Tyler’s perimeter fence. It was made of cement and eight feet tall.

  “At least there ain’t no razor wire,” Dodson whispered. “How we gonna get over this bitch?” They walked the fence and found a heavy wooden gate. It was the same height as the fence, an escape hatch for the occupants in case there was a fire, a home invasion or other emergency. Like two burglars breaking into the house. The gate was locked from the inside, probably with a latch and padlock. They looked around and found a loose cinder block. Isaiah stood on it, jumped up, got a handhold on the top of the gate and scrambled over. Dodson followed, still complaining about his sneakers.

  They crossed the vast backyard. It was dark now. Houses with their lights on flanked them. All it took was a glance from a kid and they were done. This is stupid. This is really stupid. They circled the pool, scurried around the patio staying close to the fence, then cut under the portico. No light from inside. The ground-level transoms were dark. They stood there, letting the sweat dry and catching their breath. “This crazy, Isaiah,” Dodson said. “Getting in there without the alarm going off ain’t even possible.”

  “Go back if you want,” Isaiah said, knowing Dodson wouldn’t.

  Isaiah had a lot of experience with burglar alarms. He’d handled dozens of burglary cases and personally had bypassed, sabotaged and disconnected more than a few alarms himself.

  The green and white signs said ASSURED RESPONSE SECURITY. Isaiah was familiar with their alarms. If a door or a window were opened, the occupant had thirty seconds to enter the passcode on a keypad. Go over the time limit and you tripped the noisemaker. Simultaneously, an alert was sent to the alarm company through the phone line. The system also had a backup. If the phone line were tampered with, a cell signal went out. Either way, a patrol officer would respond and show up on the doorstep with a flashlight and a gun. To get inside Tyler’s house, both systems had to be defeated.

  Earlier in the day, they’d gone over the plan.

  “The first thing we have to do is find the control box, the CPU,” Isaiah said. “It controls both the primary and backup alarms. If we disconnect it, the system is cut off from the alarm company completely.”

  “How big is it?” Dodson asked.

  “About the size of a hardback book.”

  “A hardback book?” Dodson said. “Houses up there in the hills are six, seven thousand square feet. Some of them are bigger than that. How we gonna find something that small in a crib that big, plus all the rooms and furniture and shit. That’s like looking for a needle in TK’s wrecking yard. They could hide something like that anywhere.”

  “That’s just it,” Isaiah said, “they don’t have to hide it. It’s not like a wall safe. The box only needs to be out of sight, like a fuse box. There’s a difference. Say you’re the homeowner and there’s a false alarm and the keypad won’t shut it off. Do you want to run up to the second floor or go out to the garage or move the dresser while a hundred-decibel siren is blasting your ears off? No. You want the box accessible, someplace you can get to in a hurry but a burglar would have to look for it.”

  “In thirty seconds,” Dodson said, with a deep sigh.

  “I’ve seen alarms in all kinds of houses,” Isaiah said. “The most common places to put the box are on the first floor—the foyer closet, the hallway closet, the pantry, the laundry room and the utility room. Accessible but out of sight.”

  “Be serious, Isaiah,” Dodson said. “You can’t take a piss in that much time.”

  “Once we’re in, we split up,” Isaiah replied. “You take some of the places, I take the rest. I know, we’ll have to move fast.”

  Dodson huffed. “That’s not cutting it close, that’s cutting it off. There’s still the backup too. The cell signal.”

  “I’ve got it covered.”

  “Yeah? You better hope you do.”

  There was activity in the houses next door. Lights going on and off. Doors opening and closing. TV chatter. Voices. Tyler’s back door was solid oak and the dead bolt was high quality. The newer locks were immune to picking and bumping. Isaiah drilled out the lock with a high-speed drill and a cobalt bit. He brought out a small electrical device with three stubby antennae.

  “Signal blocker,” he said. “Disrupts wireless signals, covers eight frequencies. It’ll shut down the backup.” He put his hand on the doorknob. “You ready?”

  “Not especially,” Dodson said.

  “Soon as I open the door—”

  “I know what I’m supposed to do,” Dodson said, belligerent. “The question is, should I do it at all?”

  Isaiah opened the door and they rushed in. They were in a hallway. 30…29…28. Dodson made a sharp turn into the laundry room. If the control box wasn’t there, his next stop was the kitchen pantry and any other likely places along the way.

  Isaiah sprinted down the hall, nearly tripping over a matched set of Louis Vuitton luggage. He raced across the great room, hurdling over the sectional and into the foyer. There was a small closet for coats and rain boots. He slammed open the sliding door. No control box. 23…22…21. There were stairs leading up to the second floor and another hallway. He took his own advice and chose the hallway, skittering to a stop at a larger closet. He swung the door open. No box. If Dodson had found the thing he would have shouted. 17…16…15. Isaiah was either completely wrong or he’d missed something. He’d missed something. He knew it. He’d seen something but didn’t see it. 12…11…10.

  “Oh shit,” he said. There were ground-level transoms. The house had a goddamn basement. A rarity in LA. 8…7…6. How do you get down there? He didn’t see the entrance in either of the hallways. Somewhere off the kitchen? No, Dodson would have found it. 5…4…3. Where’s the basement door, Isaiah? Where the fuck is it?

  The alarm went off. It was FUCKING LOUD; the piercing WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP! specifically engineered to fuck up your brain cells and scare the living shit out of you. If Isaiah could shut the alarm off in the next thirty seconds, the company might think it was a false alarm. 28…27…26. Dodson came running up to him, shouting, “The fuck are you doing? Wasn’t we supposed to abort?” WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP! Think, Isaiah. It’s right in front of you. “I knew this plan was stupid,” Dodson yelled. “I knew it right from the jump. Why in the fuck don’t I listen to myself?” 19…18…17. “Hello?” he continued. “Don’t go zombie on me now.” Dodson’s voice faded in the deafening whoops. Isaiah had to block them out; retreat into the whirrs and clicks of his reasoning mind. 12…11…1
0. WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP! The alarm was getting to him; he could smell his own sweat. He cupped his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. 7…6…5. Dodson was screaming something in his face. WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!

  “It’s an old house,” Isaiah said. He opened his eyes. The entrance is underneath the stairs! He raced over there and yanked open the door. 3…2…1. The control box was screwed into a two-by-four right inside the basement door. He pried off the cover with a screwdriver and disconnected a couple of wires. The alarm went quiet, its absence like a thing unto itself. They listened. Empty houses have a certain feel, a hollow silence, dense, unbreathed air. The neighbors seemed unperturbed. No one shouting or banging on the door. False alarms happened all the time. The stupid thing goes off for a minute and shuts itself off. Yeah, okay, Isaiah thought. But did the alarm company buy it?

  There were odors trapped here since Tyler’s last day on earth. Coffee, fabric softener, window cleaner, wine, sauteed fish.

  “What are we looking for?” Dodson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Isaiah said.

  Dodson looked at him. “I don’t know? Is that what you said, I don’t know?”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “The first time you said that to me was in Vegas,” Dodson said. “I didn’t like it then and I like it less now. How can we find something when we don’t know what it is?”

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” Isaiah said irritably. “Be on the lookout, okay?”