Coyne laughed wildly.
Val’s head snapped around. Does Coyne really understand that Russian shit? Was Billy the C’s mother Russian? Val couldn’t remember.
“What’s it mean, Coyne, huh?” asked Monk. “What’d he say?”
Coyne waved the question away. To the Putin eyes, he said, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, skol’ko eto stoit? Footbalka?”
Putin’s head and powerful shoulders suddenly came up and out of the shirt. Val jerked back a step. In some weird way, this was scarier than the Dahmer cannibal.
“Eight hundred thousand bucks,” said Putin in thickly accented English, smiling thinly at Coyne while shooting glances at the other boys. Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin, Sully, Monk, and Gene D. stepped back with Val.
“New bucks,” added Putin. Then smiling even more thinly, he asked Coyne, “Are you trying to hang noodle soup on my ears, droog?”
“Nyet,” said Coyne with another manic laugh. “Davajte perejdjom na ‘ty,’ Vladimir Vladimirovich.”
“Poshjoi ty!” snapped the Putin AI, laughing nastily.
Risking a brush-off from Coyne, Val said, “What’s that mean?”
“It means Fuck you,” said Coyne. His laughter was strangely like the Putin AI’s.
“What did you say to him?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Coyne turned to the bearded hajji. “I’ll take the Putin shirt.”
The hajji scanned Coyne’s NICC and looked at the boy with something like respect. The teenager with the bandolier folded the T-shirt and was getting out a paper bag to put it in.
“No, I’ll wear it,” said Coyne. Unbuttoning the blue flannel shirt he was wearing and tossing it toward the trash, the tall boy tugged on the new black T-shirt. Val noticed the 9mm Beretta tucked into the back of Coyne’s jeans, but he wasn’t sure if anyone else did. Coyne didn’t seem to care.
“Some krutoj paren’,” said the Putin face that now filled the front of the shirt.
“What’s that mean?” whined Monk.
“Tough guy,” answered Coyne. Pulling the fabric of the shirt up a bit so he could look down at the face, Coyne said to Putin, “You’re kljovyj blin, old dude. Real coolshit. And a real shishka. Now shut up while we finish our shopping.”
The gang of eight guys spread out so as not to be so conspicuous. Also, they were interested in different things.
Toohey, Cruncher, Dinjin, and Sully went off to see the new games pirated in from Japan, Russia, Consolidated Korea, India, and the other high-tech countries. Gene D., still blushing fiercely at being called pimply by the Dahmer AI, stalked off by himself. Monk followed Coyne when the leader walked down the row of stalls to browse expensive—nothing under a million bucks—new VR and other optics. Alone, Val slumped along the stalls, ignoring the cries from the vendors and the shoves from the crowd—not worrying that his pocket might be picked since he had no cash today anyway and had left his NICC at home.
One long table presided over by two hajji Afghans wearing Taliban government clothing was heaped high with fatigue jackets, combat boots, and cheap body armor from American soldiers. Dinjin and the other younger kids, who still liked to wear such crap, loved to say that this surplus stuff was all taken from dead U.S. soldiers in China and South America—and usually there was at least one blasted and bloodstained piece of dragonarmor to support such a theory—but Val was old enough to know that most of it was just stolen from the U.S. Army fighting as mercenaries for Japan and India during the long and corrupt logistics trip to the shifting front lines.
For a guy now sixteen and staring at conscription just eleven months and a few days away, Val wasn’t in the least tempted to wear castoff U.S. Army or marine clothing. He’d get his real boots and uniform and fatigues and subdural bar code soon enough.
Billy Coyne’s older brother, Brad, had his parents buy him out of the draft. Then Brad had gone on to join the Aryan Brotherhood and ended up in a sort of uniform anyway. Plus a lot more efficient body armor and with cooler guns than the poorly equipped U.S. soldiers were using to fight warlords and Hugonistas. (It was Brad’s story that made Coyne even more respected and accepted as a leader of this pathetic little white-boy flashgang, Val knew.)
When Val had told his grandfather about Brad—at least the part about Brad and Billy’s folks buying his way out of the draft—and then asked whether his grandfather could do that for him, Leonard had just stared at him as if he’d gone insane.
Sometimes Val felt sorry that he’d first thought of killing his grandfather when Coyne showed him the Beretta. After all, Val knew that the old man didn’t mean to be a total asshole. He was just trained that way as an academic.
Val had just come to an expensive table where different types of roll-up and fold-up and other flexible and micro-thin 3D-high-def displays were being shown off. Since this table was also being run by hajji “importers”—Val had long since realized that the Open Air Market was the safest place in Los Angeles to be today since there was zero chance of a suicide bomber setting his vest and himself or herself off here—they had the displays tuned to the inevitable English-language Al Jazeera stoning and beheading death channels, but they were also showing various 9-11 ceremonies around the country and around the world.
Several of the feeds were from the relatively new Shahid al-Haram Mosque which had been built on the so-called Ground Zero or World Trade Center site in New York. Val thought that the mosque was beautiful, a sort of taller, more elegant and jet-black Taj Mahal. Right now New York’s mayor, the U.S. vice president, and New York’s chief imam were taking turns saying hopeful things near the hole where that stupid World Trade Center had once risen and then the 9-11 Memorial and a new Freedom Tower had been attempted before both had been destroyed in turn.
It made sense to Val that the site should be the place for North America’s largest mosque to rise. No one’s going to attack a mosque. (Although the Greater Islamic Republic, which was Shi’ite, Leonard had explained to Val, might do so, since the Shahid al-Haram Mosque was Sunni.) Leonard had also explained to Val that Shahid al-Haram meant something like Martyrs of the Holy Place, which evidently had irritated some old-think right-wingers and die-hard American hegemonists.
But some weeks ago, Val had come into the tiny TV room in their basement apartment to find his grandfather watching some show praising the Shahid al-Haram Mosque—and two hundred other huge, new mosques currently being built or just completed in the United States (not counting the Republic of Texas, of course, which was not part of the U.S. and was not mosque-friendly)—and damned if old Leonard wasn’t blubbering silently. What the fuck was that about?
His grandfather had been embarrassed, telling the shocked and equally embarrassed Val that he only had a head cold, but it had started Val thinking—What if Leonard goes Alzheimer’s on me? What do I do then?
But a day later, over a rare shared microwave-zapped dinner, Leonard had gone all teachy and preachy on Val, trying to tell him all about what it had been like on the real 9-11, and all about himself—he’d been teaching The Etymology of John Keats’s Ass or some such crap at the University of Colorado in Boulder and had been between wives and raising Val’s three-year-old mom at the time, going to school and joining other instructors in the faculty lounge as they watched the aftermath of the martyrs’ planes crashing into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and…
Val had cut him off. Who gave the slightest sparrowfart about such ancient history? What was he, Val, supposed to do next—get all emotionally worked up about Stonewall Jackson getting killed at Gettysburg? It was all old and done and dead, man.
Stonewall Jackson died before the Battle of Gettysburg was Leonard’s pedantic response.
Well, had been Val’s withering riposte, this right-wing anti-Caliphate crap died before Leonard had gotten senile. Like all American kids, Val had studied the Q’uran since kindergarten and Islam was the Religion of Peace—any dickshit knew that. Why would Leonard get all blubbery about the beautiful Mosque of the Mart
yrs of the Holy Place in New York? What did he want? demanded Val. For them to move warmonger Greg Dubbya Bush’s bones to New York and build a crypt for them there?
“George W. Bush” had been Leonard’s sad response.
Then Val had gone out to be with the flashgang all that night and the next morning and the conversation was never picked up again.
But now, looking at the New York mayor and vice president slobbering all over the scowling, bearded New York chief imam on the TV images, Val felt uneasy for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Maybe it had to do with all the hajjis here at the open market ripping everyone off. Or maybe it was as stupid as all those American boots and uniforms being piled up and sold as if they really had just been stripped off dead American soldiers on some unpronounceable Chinese battlefield.
Val shook his head to chase away stupid thoughts and sidled over to the gun table—the reason they’d come here this morning—to watch from a distance as Coyne tried to make his purchase.
Coyne was the oldest and tallest and darkest of the eight of them—his attempt to grow a beard wasn’t completely successful, but at least he’d achieved some good, dark stubble—and although he couldn’t tamper with his NICC, he had a separate military-exemption card, originally Brad’s and then fucked around with by Brad’s AB buddies, that said he was over eighteen. Obviously, if Coyne scored with the guns he wanted, he’d have to pay cash… but he seemed to have the cash.
The hajji in charge of the gun table had shooed Toohey and the other boys away—the cop and DHS mini-drones were buzzing and hovering just a few hundred feet overhead—and now the bearded Iranian glowered suspiciously at Coyne. But the military-exemption card seemed to pass his scanner’s inspection. When the scowling hajji demanded Coyne’s NICC, Coyne smiled, shrugged, and said he hadn’t brought it—just his army-out card and a lot of cash. He was a hunter, you see, and wanted to stock up on some new weapons before deer season was over in Idaho.
That last line was such Coyne-ish bullshit that Val had to turn his face away at the nearby table where he was pretending to inspect some VRI glasses from Brazil. It was either turn away or laugh.
The hajji wasn’t laughing, Val could see in the mirror provided for those trying on the glasses, but neither did he appear to be buying Coyne’s bullshit. Still, the bearded men in the stall didn’t chase Coyne away from the table. They were letting him inspect the guns.
Coyne had been able to buy two more guns for the gang at the Old Plaza but the weapons were crap: a .38 revolver that went back to Raymond Chandler days—Val did love to read, despite himself—and a new, plastic, folding frame-grip Indonesian pistol that fired toy biodegradable .228 cartridges, the whole thing designed to sneak aboard an airliner sometime in the happy hajji past. Gene D. was carrying the .38 belly gun—it had a two-inch barrel—and Monk had been placated with the Indonesian toy.
Coyne hadn’t yet told the gang where or how they were supposed to do this endlessly flashable hit on an important Jap, but he was insisting that they all needed weapons and that he needed at least one serious auto-flechette mini-gun. To Val, he’d whispered that he’d give him the 9mm Beretta, which pleased Val. He’d liked the heft and feel of the gun in his hand and he was still having images of shooting his old man in the belly with one of those big dum-dummed bullets.
Coyne was lifting and checking the balance of a modern black, blocky OAO Izhmash flechette-spewer. It seemed to be what the flashgang leader wanted and he’d started dickering with the hajji when the glowering carpet-bumper, with a quick glance at the mini-drones overhead and the four LAPD black knights now walking the length of the stalls, suddenly and angrily waved Coyne away from the table.
Coyne shrugged and slouched away. But he was grinning when Val caught up to him at the games table.
“The nasty old fudge-packer slipped me this, Val.” Coyne showed him a tiny green card with the address of a street Val knew to be under another condemned slab and a pencil-scribbled 2400 on the card. “Midnight market,” whispered Coyne. “Tomorrow night. Towelhead’ll sell me three of those beautiful OAO fuckers—more if I have the money—and by Monday we’ll be set. You sure you don’t want a mini-gun?”
Val shook his head. “I like the Beretta.”
Coyne grinned and punched him on the arm just as the other guys showed up.
“Hey, B.C., saw you get chased away by the hajji stud,” shouted Cruncher. “When we gonna hear about when we get to zip the Nip, zap the… ooof!”
This last noise was as the air went out of the big, slobby boy after Coyne had punched him—not at all in a friendly way—deep in the gut. Coyne hit him again and Cruncher went down like a bag of laundry. As the other boys stepped back, Coyne flicked a fast finger up at the drones.
One of the LAPD black-armored wraiths swiveled at the sound of Cruncher hitting the pavement and spoke into his helmet mike. The three other cops also then swiveled Coyne’s way, their movements smooth and oily as those of robots in a sci-fi movie, and visors snicked down as the cops magnified the scene.
Grinning broadly, Coyne showed empty palms in the cops’ direction and then offered his hand to help Cruncher up. Val started laughing stupidly as if it were all just play and a few of the smarter guys in the gang followed suit. Cruncher got up, scowling, his lower lip thrust out like a sulking four-year-old’s, and Coyne led the way to the nearest down-ladder, his arm around the fat boy. Just a bunch of dumbshit homies on their early-morning adventure out to the grown-ups’ market.
THREE BLOCKS AWAY AND in the musty-smelling darkness under an angled, low-hanging, block-long tumbled slab of the 10 and safely out of sight or mike-range of any interested thing aerial or on foot, Coyne hit Cruncher again, this time full in the mouth.
Val heard teeth snap off and watched coldly as the heavy, stupid fat boy went down again.
“You stupid fuck,” snarled Coyne, standing astride the fallen Cruncher. “You fucking stupid cunt-stupid fuck. Do you think this is a fucking game? Don’t you know that you can get us all killed? Dropped in the ass-fucking Dodger Stadium DHSDC hole for the rest of our fucking lives? Do you want to be manpussy for spanic and nigger humpbugger killers for the rest of your fucking life?”
Coyne twirled, fists still clenched and face still distorted into a snarling mask, to face the others—to face everyone, Val knew, except Val—and screamed, “Do you, you pansyassed motherfuckers? You want to get yourself picked up by DHS and tortured or just offed, fucking do it! But don’t do it to me, goddamn you, or I’ll do it to you first, you fuckheads!”
Suddenly the Beretta was in Coyne’s right hand. Thinking about it later, Val still couldn’t see him reaching back for it, making the motion toward it. One second Coyne’s hand was a fist and in the next second—the black muzzle-circle of death was moving, aiming at all of them one after the other.
Everybody except Val was babbling an apology, was swearing he wouldn’t fuck up, was saying he’d never say anything where anyone could hear it. Even Cruncher was spewing apologies along with shards of his broken teeth and gobbets of blood from his pulped lips.
Everyone was talking except Val.
Coyne aimed the Beretta—Val’s Beretta it was supposed to be—straight at Val’s face. “Do you understand, shitstain? Are you going to keep your mouth shut?”
Hurt, Val could only blink and nod. He felt a strange sensation with the gun aimed at him—a crawling around his scrotum, as if his testicles wanted to crawl back up inside his body, and a sudden urge to hide behind someone, anyone, even himself.
Val heard himself say, “You haven’t told us how and where we can kill a Jap yet.”
Coyne smiled, slid the gun under his now attentive and grimly smiling Putin shirt, and nodded in return. He gestured everyone into a crouching circle. Even Cruncher struggled to his knees to join.
“Not a Jap,” whispered Coyne. “The Jap. Daichi Omura himself. The California Advisor.”
Some of the boys whistled. Cruncher tried to but just wi
nced and touched his ruined lips and broken teeth with tentative fingers.
“Shut up,” Coyne said. Everyone shut up.
“This Friday evening, they’re having a big city thing rededicating the Disney Performing Arts Center down on Grand Avenue in the city center. The spanic mayor and everyone’ll be there, but no one but the top guys and us knows that Advisor Omura’s showing up, coming down from the Green Zone and Getty Castle in a motorcade. I know right when he’ll arrive—to the second—and where the armored limo will pull up and which side Omura will get out of the car on and where the bodyguards will be.”
“But how could…,” squeaked Dinjin and was slapped into silence by Toohey or one of the others.
Val, still blushing with anger and embarrassment, understood. Coyne had so much money because his divorced mother worked for the city—worked as liaison for the Advisor’s office and the city. Worked in the transportation department.
“And we’ll be there waiting,” said Coyne. Looking from face to face.
Gene D. was shaking his head. “I’ve seen that sorta thing on TV, B.C. And no disrespect or nothing, but… I mean… like… we ain’t going to get within ten blocks of that Performing Arts place and whatever’s goin’ on inside. Especially if the Advisor’s going to be there. It’d be like a pope visiting and…”
“They killed a pope not long ago,” interrupted Coyne.
Gene D. nodded, shook his head, found his strand again. “No, I mean… you know… there’s going to be state troopers and whatchamacallims… the federal guys…”
“Homeland,” said a sullen Sully.
“Yeah, but no,” said Gene D., “that’s not who I mean. Those other federal guys…”
“The State Department Office of Security,” said Coyne, showing everyone how patient he was being.
“Yeah. And not only them but the Jap protection guys as well…,” said Gene D. and sort of wound down. It was a pretty impressive showing by a not very impressive kid, thought Val.