Finally, the noise subsided, the room empty. The crowd left behind broken martini and highball glasses and clear glass plates with pâté and barbequed meatballs mixed with crumbled crackers. The two scared bartenders held their ground behind the bar. Jumbo regained some composure. “You really know how to ruin a celebration.”

“That right? What’re you celebrating?”

He moved to the bar, turning his back to me. In a lowered voice he asked the bartender, “Glenfiddich neat.” He waited until she poured and he slugged down the amber liquid and set the glass down for a refill.

“One of your overseas companies just post a huge profit?”

He took the bottle of Glenfiddich and moved to the couch. To the ladies he said, “You girls are excused for the evening. Sorry for the short night. You’ll, of course, be compensated.”

He poured another. If he kept it up, he’d be pickled by morning. The girls grabbed their stylish purses from under the counter and picked their way through the debris field to the front door.

“And to answer your question, yes, an overseas corporation just posted an excellent accounting for the last quarter.”

“I can imagine. What, a ten-million-dollar profit? Computer chips?”

He didn’t answer and took another long pull.

I asked, “Where’s Ned?”

“Don’t try and play games with me. I know why you’re here.”

I stepped over to an end table and picked up a bronze sculpture, an abstraction of what looked like an African gazelle melded with an African tribesman, and held it down by my side. I liked the heft of it.

“Detective Johnson, you are a true thug.” Now Jumbo looked really scared. Just the way I wanted him.

“What happened to calling me Bad Boy?”

“They asked me to try and get you to talk about Ned, but obviously you’re too smart for that.”

His words came out and entered my brain, but didn’t immediately sink in. Slow motion analysis because I knew their meaning and didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want it to be true.

Then Jumbo said the words I knew were coming next. The words that meant the end of my world as I knew it.

The end of everything.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Jumbo smiled when he said, “Looks like some bad weather. Might even be a tornado brewing out there.”

BMFs were a tight-knit team. They had to be to chase the most dangerous animals in the world. They read each other’s moves, knew what each team member was thinking, and used code words to operate on a covert level that at the same time confounded their prey. Robby Wicks had used the same code words from bygone days as a matter of flaunting his ability to outmaneuver me. “Might be a tornado brewing,” was the bust sign when the informant was in fear for his life and wanted the cops to swarm in and save him.

Jumbo was wearing a wire.

He was cooperating with the police.

I took a long step toward him. Before my foot had a chance to touch down, there came rapid crackling on the pool deck, storm troopers, their boots treading upon millions of little ice-cubed glass on the concrete. Behind me the thump of running feet. I was surrounded. Rage enveloped in a blanket of red. I raised the gazelle and advanced, determined to take out the rat who’d ruined everything.

“Freeze, don’t move. Asshole, don’t you move.”

I was focused on bashing in Jumbo’s head. In my peripheral vision I processed the words, the commands from Deputy Mack as he stepped into the living room, his large-caliber handgun pointed at my chest. The ugly image of the dead kid shoved up against the wall of Mr. Cho’s store flashed on the wall of my brain, the unstoppable revelation of how in a couple more seconds I, too, would be posed in the same manner.

I thought: go ahead and shoot. My Marie was gone from me forever. I took another long step. Jumbo lost his arrogant smirk, tried to scramble away from me. I was too quick. I was on him, pulled back for a deadly bludgeoning.

Mack, stopped, yelled, displaying a crazy man’s eyes, spittle flying, his gun, a large dark train tunnel pointed at my nose. Still undeterred, I took another step.

“Bruno, stop right there, or I’ll blow your black ass right to hell.”

For two years, these very same words in quiet moments alone in a cell, echoed in my brain. They triggered some kind of primordial survival instinct that froze all muscle and bone. Even if I wanted to act, I couldn’t. I couldn’t override the instinct put there to save my life. Those same words were said the last time a second prior to the bullet blasting through my shoulder and knocking me on my ass. The same words said by the same person. I held the gazelle cocked over my head and slowly turned my torso to where Robby stood in the entry, his gun pointed right at me, the same as the last time. Robby, my old friend and supervisor.

“Shoot me. Please shoot me.”

Robby smiled. “Can’t. We got video rolling. Or, believe me, I’d love to save the state all the money it’s going to take to put you on death row.”

I yelled and charged.

Mack tackled me from behind. Then two tons of rhinos fell on me.

I was handcuffed and hobbled, my hands behind my back, feet bound and hooked to the handcuffs, hog-tied.

One of the deputies involved in the dog pile skewered his upper thigh with the gazelle horn. He bled copiously onto Jumbo’s white Berber rug. Jumbo jumped around, “Get him out of here. Get him off the rug. You’re kidding me, right? Get him the fuck outside. Who’s going to pay for this? Who’s going to pay for the window this black bastard shattered?”

Robby stepped over to a lamp and draped a towel over it. One of the many towels a deputy retrieved from the bathroom to use as a pressure bandage on his partner’s leg. A motel-like lamp that I should’ve immediately noticed when I walked in, should have recognized. A lamp camera, the same model we had used on other operations, the county too cheap to buy the updated version. Another in-your-face detail Robby would gloat over and tell in war stories again and again. I’d been too intent on looking for the real threat, Crazy Ned Bressler. All the people at the party a distraction as well in Jumbo’s well-appointed house. Like a fool I’d been taken in by it all.

Once the camera was out of commission, Robby stepped over to Jumbo, C-clamped him with one strong hand around his throat, got up in his ear because there was still audio and whispered. Jumbo turned ashen and nodded again and again.

Paramedics clamored in with all their gear and immediately went to work on the African-gazelle-gored deputy who no longer moaned and lay absolutely still in a sea of turmoil. Two deputies leaned hard on blood-soaked towels that plugged the wounded leg.

Robby said, “Get this piece of shit out of my sight.” He kicked me in the side.

Mack and two other deputies picked me up like a suitcase. My arms and legs and wrists screamed in pain.

Robby looked at his watch. “Put him in my car. Mack, you stay with him. I’ll be right out.” He turned to the paramedic. “How’s he doing?”

The paramedic stood, his latex gloves splotched with blood and nodded his head for Robby to step aside. They moved with the group carrying me to the door. They stopped, but I heard the medic. “His femoral artery is severed. We have to scoop and run. We can’t wait on the airship. Can you give us a code-three escort?”

“Shit. Shit. Hell yes. Jenkins, you and Fong, you know the routine. Call ahead, leapfrog the intersections and don’t spare the horses, you understand? I mean haul ass.” I was outside in the cold night air and didn’t hear the response, if there was one. Robby was looking out for his own.

I didn’t hurt the deputy. It was an accident. But even so, I still owned a piece of that emotion.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I was in the car facedown and still I heard Jumbo yell, “My God, look at all the blood. There’s blood everywhere—There’s—” His words artificially choked off with outside assistance.